Five Minutes of Cool: A true story
Jan. 5th, 2005 12:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfieldAndy Warhol is famously quoted as saying, "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." Being famous is nice, I guess, because it makes you stand a little taller and smile a little brighter. But what good is it, really? Unless you can parlay your notoriety into dating a supermodel or getting a nice table at restaurants, being famous is excruciatingly temporary and generally useless.
Being cool, though – that's currency. And even if you're only cool for a mere five minutes, you can deposit those five minutes in the bank and live off the interest forever.
For five minutes, Jacob wasn't just cool. He was the coolest person on the planet, momentarily leapfrogging Jack Nicholson, Joe Montana and Snoop Dogg. For one moment of one day in July 1997, they were all merely living in Jacob's world as he spun it on his finger.
In the summer of 1997, Jacob was 20 years old and he was seeing ghosts.
Back home for his summer break, there were ghosts of Estella everywhere. Four years of memories hovered low in the air, a thick fog blurring the horizon in every direction. Estella and Jacob first started their courtship in the autumn of 1992 and quickly became the sweetest of high school sweethearts. There was romance, sex, love, fights, breakups, make-ups and prominades.
With every step and every glance around their shared neighborhood, Jacob was again and again confronted by those ghosts. And their love, once a delicately assembled string of pearls, had become twisted into knots in his stomach.
# # #
The second-biggest knot in Jacob's stomach represented the moment in August 1996 when they sat on her back porch sipping lemonade and Estella told Jacob – with a kind of determination he had never seen before – that she didn't want to be his girlfriend anymore.
(This was probably fair. A year of college had taken its toll; the only thing holding them together now was history and sex, and both of those things were fading with atrophy.)
The biggest knot in Jacob's stomach formed the next day in a friend's driveway, when Jacob learned that for all of July 1996, Estella had been secretly and intimately involved with another man -- a bodybuilder named Paul, who was a real "guy" in all the ways Jacob was not. It turns out that Estella had not only been lying to Jacob but parading this new guy around behind his back like the goose that laid the golden... well, you know.
(This was not fair. Estella had been Jacob's "first" everything, so perhaps it was fitting that she was his first lesson that life was unfair. He handled it the way most 19-year old boys would handle it: he went cuckoo.)
Jacob was understandably and by all accounts shattered by this news. The pain and humiliation stung like paper cuts, but what really sliced him open was the undeniable verification that Estella would not be coming back. He still loved her, and now he hated her too, each emotion strangling the other.
The following morning, Jacob confronted Estella with her crimes. He yelled, he called her names, he made her cry. He cried a little, too. The whole thing was not a particularly manly display. Still, he walked away feeling justified and righteous, if not proud.
Things would have been okay -- shitty, but okay -- if they had stopped there. Unfortunately, situations like this commonly involve too many bad feelings, too much bad behavior to be shouldered by one person. When couples explode, there is ground zero --total devestation where the relationship used to be -- and then there are all the free radicals of highly charged emotion that shower all the survivors with radiation. It rained on Jacob, hard.
Estella deserved and blithely accepted most of the blame, though it was plainly evident that she did not spend a whole lot of time worrying about it. Jacob, now drenched, tried to heap a little more weight on her back, and inadvertently carried some of the load himself.
Quickly back at college for his sophomore year, Jacob impishly dashed off a pair of silly e-mails, one a playfully cruel mass mailing to Estella and all their common friends, the other a blatantly insecure and self-gratifying treatise to Estella herself. Cuckoo.
If these e-mails had a point, it was conspicuously absent. Instead they made Jacob look ugly, bitter, like a loser. They made Jacob feel empty, devoid of the closure he desperately wanted. He would have to wait.
# # #
By July 1997, Jacob hadn't seen or spoken to Estella in nine months. At school, he had been able to blot out her image temporarily with other girls and other interests and a steady diet of internet porn. But at home, there were the ghosts. One day, as he strolled the neutral ground between his house and hers -- an artificial duck pond in the middle of a gaudy housing development -- he decided he was tired of turning around and thinking that she might be there, and worrying about what might come out of his mouth. And so he scheduled an exorcism.
That evening he called her at home, her phone number still stored in the muscle memory of his fingers. She answered casually, an unfamiliar echo of innocence in her voice.
"Hello, Estella. This is Jacob."
Silence. Perhaps fear, definitely confusion.
"Estella?" Jacob smiled, reveling in the control.
"Hi, Jacob. Um." Estella tried to switch to auto-pilot. "How are you?"
"I'm good," Jacob said, and took back the wheel. "Say, are you busy right now? I was wondering if we could get together so I could talk to you about a few things."
"What things?" More fear, and nerves. "What kind of things?"
"It'll just take ten minutes. I promise to be good," Jacob lied.
"I don't know..."
Jacob didn't want to play this card, but he had to see her soon or he would lose his nerve. "Come on. I think you owe me."
A deep breath, or a sigh, Jacob couldn't really tell. Either way, "Okay."
Jacob smiled. "Meet me at the duck pond in twenty minutes. I'll have you home before dinner."
Click.
Jacob dressed in shorts and a simple white t-shirt that showed off a slightly leaner body than the one Estella would remember. He ran his fingers over a two-week beard that he thought made him look tougher and wiser. (Actually, it just made him look older and hairier.) He told his mother he was going out for a bit, but he didn't say where.
He was already sitting on the small dock of the pond when she turned the corner, walking toward him in her tightly coiled gait, looking just as pretty as the last time he had seen her, prettier still for the setting sunlight that was making her hair glow light brown. As she came closer, he saw her cloudy green eyes -- green eyes that used to twinkle like supernovas. He didn't inspire the twinkle anymore. But he did get a hug.
And they sat there on the dock, like a Norman Rockwell painting bizarrely aged, sharing small talk. How is school? How is the family? Any exercise tips?
Then the medium-sized talk. "Still with Paul?" he asked. (Yes, she was.)
"Are you seeing anyone?" she asked. (No, he was not.)
"Do all your friends hate me?" she asked. ("Yes," he said.)
"Do all your friends hate me? he asked. (Your name never comes up, she said.)
The sun was sinking faster, now. Jacob turned to her at the next lull in the conversation.
"Listen, 'Stell. The reason I wanted to talk to you was so that I could tell you four important things, okay?"
She nodded.
"First, I want to say that what you did last year, how you handled things, was really rotten. It hurt me a lot, and it's taken me a really long time to get over it.
"Second, I want to say how sorry I am for acting like such an asshole after it all happened. If anything I said or wrote hurt you, I hope you'll accept my apology and not think any less of me for it.
"Third, I want you to know that I love you and I will always love you, no matter what happened or what happens. And I want you to be happy, more than anything else.
"And the fourth thing -- actually, I originally only had three things to say. But then I saw you again, and now I want to tell you that you're still the most beautiful girl I've ever seen."
And then Jacob smiled, and stood up. "We've got to get you home."
Estella stood up, partly dazed, possibly freaked, and followed Jacob off the dock.
With a short walk, they found themselves in the middle of the intersection of Samson and Timberline Drive, with Jacob's destination east and Estella's south. They exchanged good-byes and take-care-of-yourselfs and finally embraced one last time.
And as Jacob pulled back from Estella's hug and stepped away, he looked at her with devil's eyes and said:
"By the way. I want to apologize in advance. For later."
Estella froze. "Jacob. What did you do?"
Jacob grinned ear-to-ear and leaned in a few steps.
"You won't be able to stop thinking about me tonight."
And he turned around and walked away without looking back.
# # #
Jacob didn't hear from Estella in the few days following their rendezvous. He didn't really expect to, either, since she was still dating Paul and friendship was the farthest thing from his mind. But at least the fog was lifted and his stomach was free of knots, and Jacob could see and breathe again.
It was a satisfying ending to a bittersweet story.
Then, a week later, Jacob got a letter in the mail. It was from Estella, dated two days after their meeting. It started out, "Jacob, just like you said, I haven't been able to get you out of my mind." And the following two pages contained the most heartfelt, moving apology ever committed to paper without the benefit of tear stains, and a plea for friendship.
This was a highly satisfying ending, making the bittersweet story a little more sweet.
It got sweeter. Soon, Estella was calling Jacob several times a week, just to talk. Eventually, she started complaining about Paul. Late one night, they were driving home from a movie, and Estella looked at Jacob with the supernovas in her eyes. Jacob pulled the car over -- alongside the duck pond -- and kissed her with a year's worth of kisses. Estella dumped Paul the next day.
And here comes the most satisfying ending of all: they lived happily ever after. But not like you think.
Yes, Jacob and Estella played out their summer together, giving themselves the coda they deserved before it all got messy. But they also realized in those final weeks that they had outgrown each other, like a comfortable flannel shirt that's been so stained and torn and worn through that you can't wear it outside anymore. Instead, you pack it up safely and take it with you wherever you go. Just like Jacob's five minutes of cool.
Estella fell in love and married a fine man who fits her beautifully. Jacob, who is still shopping for the right shirt, remains happy for her, and proud of her, and in love with the idea of love.
That, in itself, may not be particularly cool. But it lasts a lot longer.
Being cool, though – that's currency. And even if you're only cool for a mere five minutes, you can deposit those five minutes in the bank and live off the interest forever.
For five minutes, Jacob wasn't just cool. He was the coolest person on the planet, momentarily leapfrogging Jack Nicholson, Joe Montana and Snoop Dogg. For one moment of one day in July 1997, they were all merely living in Jacob's world as he spun it on his finger.
In the summer of 1997, Jacob was 20 years old and he was seeing ghosts.
Back home for his summer break, there were ghosts of Estella everywhere. Four years of memories hovered low in the air, a thick fog blurring the horizon in every direction. Estella and Jacob first started their courtship in the autumn of 1992 and quickly became the sweetest of high school sweethearts. There was romance, sex, love, fights, breakups, make-ups and prominades.
With every step and every glance around their shared neighborhood, Jacob was again and again confronted by those ghosts. And their love, once a delicately assembled string of pearls, had become twisted into knots in his stomach.
# # #
The second-biggest knot in Jacob's stomach represented the moment in August 1996 when they sat on her back porch sipping lemonade and Estella told Jacob – with a kind of determination he had never seen before – that she didn't want to be his girlfriend anymore.
(This was probably fair. A year of college had taken its toll; the only thing holding them together now was history and sex, and both of those things were fading with atrophy.)
The biggest knot in Jacob's stomach formed the next day in a friend's driveway, when Jacob learned that for all of July 1996, Estella had been secretly and intimately involved with another man -- a bodybuilder named Paul, who was a real "guy" in all the ways Jacob was not. It turns out that Estella had not only been lying to Jacob but parading this new guy around behind his back like the goose that laid the golden... well, you know.
(This was not fair. Estella had been Jacob's "first" everything, so perhaps it was fitting that she was his first lesson that life was unfair. He handled it the way most 19-year old boys would handle it: he went cuckoo.)
Jacob was understandably and by all accounts shattered by this news. The pain and humiliation stung like paper cuts, but what really sliced him open was the undeniable verification that Estella would not be coming back. He still loved her, and now he hated her too, each emotion strangling the other.
The following morning, Jacob confronted Estella with her crimes. He yelled, he called her names, he made her cry. He cried a little, too. The whole thing was not a particularly manly display. Still, he walked away feeling justified and righteous, if not proud.
Things would have been okay -- shitty, but okay -- if they had stopped there. Unfortunately, situations like this commonly involve too many bad feelings, too much bad behavior to be shouldered by one person. When couples explode, there is ground zero --total devestation where the relationship used to be -- and then there are all the free radicals of highly charged emotion that shower all the survivors with radiation. It rained on Jacob, hard.
Estella deserved and blithely accepted most of the blame, though it was plainly evident that she did not spend a whole lot of time worrying about it. Jacob, now drenched, tried to heap a little more weight on her back, and inadvertently carried some of the load himself.
Quickly back at college for his sophomore year, Jacob impishly dashed off a pair of silly e-mails, one a playfully cruel mass mailing to Estella and all their common friends, the other a blatantly insecure and self-gratifying treatise to Estella herself. Cuckoo.
If these e-mails had a point, it was conspicuously absent. Instead they made Jacob look ugly, bitter, like a loser. They made Jacob feel empty, devoid of the closure he desperately wanted. He would have to wait.
# # #
By July 1997, Jacob hadn't seen or spoken to Estella in nine months. At school, he had been able to blot out her image temporarily with other girls and other interests and a steady diet of internet porn. But at home, there were the ghosts. One day, as he strolled the neutral ground between his house and hers -- an artificial duck pond in the middle of a gaudy housing development -- he decided he was tired of turning around and thinking that she might be there, and worrying about what might come out of his mouth. And so he scheduled an exorcism.
That evening he called her at home, her phone number still stored in the muscle memory of his fingers. She answered casually, an unfamiliar echo of innocence in her voice.
"Hello, Estella. This is Jacob."
Silence. Perhaps fear, definitely confusion.
"Estella?" Jacob smiled, reveling in the control.
"Hi, Jacob. Um." Estella tried to switch to auto-pilot. "How are you?"
"I'm good," Jacob said, and took back the wheel. "Say, are you busy right now? I was wondering if we could get together so I could talk to you about a few things."
"What things?" More fear, and nerves. "What kind of things?"
"It'll just take ten minutes. I promise to be good," Jacob lied.
"I don't know..."
Jacob didn't want to play this card, but he had to see her soon or he would lose his nerve. "Come on. I think you owe me."
A deep breath, or a sigh, Jacob couldn't really tell. Either way, "Okay."
Jacob smiled. "Meet me at the duck pond in twenty minutes. I'll have you home before dinner."
Click.
Jacob dressed in shorts and a simple white t-shirt that showed off a slightly leaner body than the one Estella would remember. He ran his fingers over a two-week beard that he thought made him look tougher and wiser. (Actually, it just made him look older and hairier.) He told his mother he was going out for a bit, but he didn't say where.
He was already sitting on the small dock of the pond when she turned the corner, walking toward him in her tightly coiled gait, looking just as pretty as the last time he had seen her, prettier still for the setting sunlight that was making her hair glow light brown. As she came closer, he saw her cloudy green eyes -- green eyes that used to twinkle like supernovas. He didn't inspire the twinkle anymore. But he did get a hug.
And they sat there on the dock, like a Norman Rockwell painting bizarrely aged, sharing small talk. How is school? How is the family? Any exercise tips?
Then the medium-sized talk. "Still with Paul?" he asked. (Yes, she was.)
"Are you seeing anyone?" she asked. (No, he was not.)
"Do all your friends hate me?" she asked. ("Yes," he said.)
"Do all your friends hate me? he asked. (Your name never comes up, she said.)
The sun was sinking faster, now. Jacob turned to her at the next lull in the conversation.
"Listen, 'Stell. The reason I wanted to talk to you was so that I could tell you four important things, okay?"
She nodded.
"First, I want to say that what you did last year, how you handled things, was really rotten. It hurt me a lot, and it's taken me a really long time to get over it.
"Second, I want to say how sorry I am for acting like such an asshole after it all happened. If anything I said or wrote hurt you, I hope you'll accept my apology and not think any less of me for it.
"Third, I want you to know that I love you and I will always love you, no matter what happened or what happens. And I want you to be happy, more than anything else.
"And the fourth thing -- actually, I originally only had three things to say. But then I saw you again, and now I want to tell you that you're still the most beautiful girl I've ever seen."
And then Jacob smiled, and stood up. "We've got to get you home."
Estella stood up, partly dazed, possibly freaked, and followed Jacob off the dock.
With a short walk, they found themselves in the middle of the intersection of Samson and Timberline Drive, with Jacob's destination east and Estella's south. They exchanged good-byes and take-care-of-yourselfs and finally embraced one last time.
And as Jacob pulled back from Estella's hug and stepped away, he looked at her with devil's eyes and said:
"By the way. I want to apologize in advance. For later."
Estella froze. "Jacob. What did you do?"
Jacob grinned ear-to-ear and leaned in a few steps.
"You won't be able to stop thinking about me tonight."
And he turned around and walked away without looking back.
# # #
Jacob didn't hear from Estella in the few days following their rendezvous. He didn't really expect to, either, since she was still dating Paul and friendship was the farthest thing from his mind. But at least the fog was lifted and his stomach was free of knots, and Jacob could see and breathe again.
It was a satisfying ending to a bittersweet story.
Then, a week later, Jacob got a letter in the mail. It was from Estella, dated two days after their meeting. It started out, "Jacob, just like you said, I haven't been able to get you out of my mind." And the following two pages contained the most heartfelt, moving apology ever committed to paper without the benefit of tear stains, and a plea for friendship.
This was a highly satisfying ending, making the bittersweet story a little more sweet.
It got sweeter. Soon, Estella was calling Jacob several times a week, just to talk. Eventually, she started complaining about Paul. Late one night, they were driving home from a movie, and Estella looked at Jacob with the supernovas in her eyes. Jacob pulled the car over -- alongside the duck pond -- and kissed her with a year's worth of kisses. Estella dumped Paul the next day.
And here comes the most satisfying ending of all: they lived happily ever after. But not like you think.
Yes, Jacob and Estella played out their summer together, giving themselves the coda they deserved before it all got messy. But they also realized in those final weeks that they had outgrown each other, like a comfortable flannel shirt that's been so stained and torn and worn through that you can't wear it outside anymore. Instead, you pack it up safely and take it with you wherever you go. Just like Jacob's five minutes of cool.
Estella fell in love and married a fine man who fits her beautifully. Jacob, who is still shopping for the right shirt, remains happy for her, and proud of her, and in love with the idea of love.
That, in itself, may not be particularly cool. But it lasts a lot longer.
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A Few Questions
Date: 2005-01-09 08:19 am (UTC)2. Why a conflicted mood for something in which there is (purportedly) no conflict left?
3. If you really believed 5 minutes was enough, would you really still be "in love with the idea of love?"
Re: A Few Questions
Date: 2005-01-10 01:35 am (UTC)1. I was reminded of this story while at home for the holidays, when -- in an effort to escape my father's incessant smoking and my mother's incessant Oprah-watching -- I took a walk around the neighborhood and found myself at the very same duck pond. A few days later, I had the opportunity to meet and catch up with "Estella," which is when I realized how happy I was that everything turned out the way it did. Besides that, I think that there's no bad time for a good story, although I guess I would prefer to tell my "most embarassing moment" story without my parents around.
2. I don't know what the author was thinking about when he wrote about that "conflicted" stuff. He certainly didn't get that from me. He must have been talking about something else, like his love-hate relationship with Britney Spears. (Don't shake your head, enchanted_pants. You know it's true.)
3. If I understand your question correctly, one of the flaws in the author's storytelling is that there are two distinct themes circulating at the end of that story, leaving some room for confusion. First: Being "cool" is important, not just because it is critical to our own self-image but also because it influences our every behavior. Being "cool" for five minutes can be enough to make a person feel confident and okay about themselves for a really long time. Second: being "in love with the idea of love" is about knowing that relationships can be shitty and even painful sometimes, but the good parts are good enough that taking the risk is worth it. It's kind of a cheesy moral -- that is to say, uncool -- but it's the kind of ethos that comes from a very confident place.