[Click to read Part 1 - Stella's, 1992]

Janusz and I parted ways shortly after the vomiting incident. We went to a free Pearl Jam concert in the park, and then I met a boy my own age at my high school, and started dating him. Cut to just over three years and a half years later, after that high school boy and I had finally broken up for the last time. I’d been flirting with a young intellectual hipster in my Sociology class. He, unlike the high school boy, had impeccable Euro-trash style, a love of chrome housewares, and fastidiously tidy handwriting. Unlike the high school boy, he didn’t live in a carpeted house full of other 20-year-old boys who liked to ignite their farts; he lived in a studio with a hardwood floor. Alone. He also had a striking addiction to coffee.

Naturally, after our first date, we went to a coffee shop. It was as artsy and pretentious as you would expect from a place called Bauhaus. We each ordered a triple tall something-or-other, and the budding intellectual and I sat at our table discussing the social psychology of gated communities, and the applications of Goffman’s theories, chugging down our coffee and eyeing each other’s college-swanky cocktail attire. I decided it was time for a little break, and excused myself for a cigarette.

The budding intellectual didn’t smoke, but, ever the rebel, in those days I was what I called an “anti-social smoker.” I didn’t light up when everybody else did, I preferred smoking by myself — a little private moment to collect my thoughts. I went out to the sidewalk and smoked my cigarette, mulling over where the evening might be headed. While not the ingénue I’d been in 1992, my amorous experiences were limited to that one high school boyfriend, and so I was far from a smooth operator. I was one of those over-analytical girls who liked to plan every second of my approaching seductions: carefully plot each seemingly spontaneous angle of the neck and brushing of knees.

I stubbed out my cigarette and went back into the coffee shop, where the budding intellectual was doodling social theories on a napkin in his perfect handwriting. We continued to chat in the way that young people who think they’re incredibly clever like to do, and then I realized that I couldn’t continue drinking my coffee. I felt a little queasy. Maybe it was time to switch to water.

Do you see where this is going?

The conversation sputtered a bit when I went to the restroom to vomit the first time, careful not to get any of my reappearing dinner on my blue dress. I washed my face, reapplied my lipstick, and returned to the table with a smile. No need to slow down the pace of badinage with my nausea: it would only make the budding intellectual uncomfortable, and I pride myself on keeping everyone in a comfort zone. He started going on and on about some amazing bookshelf he was going to build. I nodded politely and tried to look interested, despite the fact that most of my attention was dedicated to not coughing appetizers mingled with coffee into his lap.

I bolted for the bathroom again, and vomited twice. There were no green checked tiles this time. This was the bathroom of a gritty urban coffee shop, all blood red painted walls and dark lighting. This was not a floor that invited kneeling. Someone knocked on the door. “Just a minute!” I lied, and puked again.

By the time I returned to the table, there was no point in pretending. “You look a little green around the gills,” the budding intellectual said, interrupting his brilliant dissemination of nuevo urban planning methods. “I feel really sick,” I admitted, choking back another round of dry-heaves. “I just threw up, like, 4 times,” I said, dropping my collegiate tongue and slipping into my Island vernacular. A weak smile then, quickly squelched because I was neurotic about bits of regurgitated food being stuck between my teeth. Bits of digested food were not included in seduction game plan.

The budding intellectual was worried. He got me a second glass of water, and sat next to me. “What should we do,” he asked. “Should I take you home?” I lived 20 minutes north, and explained that I didn’t want to vomit in his vintage late-‘60s Porsche. Ever the clever one, he thought for a minute and said, “Well, I live just a couple blocks away. We could walk to my house and you could rest for a bit?”

Do you see where this is going? Whereas poor Janusz had only been able to offer the snarling dog of my upset stomach the rotting bone of the UW computer lab, the budding intellectual offered up a plate of well-decorated studio apartment with a view.

We arrived at his house, and I rested on his couch, and he went on about that goddamn shelf he was going to design; the shelf that was going to radicalize industrial design aesthetics. I swallowed back another round of vomit. His house was awfully quiet, and I knew that if I went into his bathroom to vomit again, he would hear me: somehow, that seemed like the most humiliating moment imaginable. I could picture it as a scene from a movie: the camera points to the good-looking college boy. Sounds of food splashing against a toilet bowl dominate the soundtrack. He winces and looks disgusted. Fade to black. So I asked if I could take a shower. That would make some noise that I could then quietly empty my stomach under.

Naturally, he agreed, and set me up with a matching towel and washcloth set, as well as an oversized bathrobe. I took a shower in his claw foot tub, enjoying the naked baroque women adorning his shower curtain. Suddenly, I realized that I’d found myself completely naked in this cute boy’s apartment late on a Saturday night. An evil smile spread across my face, as the shower’s water ran down my shoulders. Suddenly, the nausea was gone. I emerged from the bathroom wrapped in his bathrobe, and needless to say, stayed the night.

We dated for three or four months after that.

Perhaps this story makes my Regurgatory Erotic Response sound like a conscious thing: the woman who feigns illness and then demurs, “I don’t feel well — will you help me to the bed?” If only I were so in control of the situation. Regurgatory Erotic Response has stayed with me to this day, forcing me to vomit in the backyard of a boy I was bringing home (that was Andreas), and on a street corner after a house party (that was the boy from Shultzy’s Sausages). While perhaps a few times the nausea has faded enough for some actual amorous actions to take place (a trip to San Francisco comes to mind), the majority of the nights that have involved attractive potential bedmates and copious vomiting have ended with me shivering on the bathroom floor, contemplating the tiles.