It all began with this conversation I was having with Tom about insane coworkers. (His Anti-Valentine to Karen is below.) It started me to thinking. Who would my consummate Anti-Valentine be? If I hadn't already written my paean to Ben Herman, he would've been a likely candidate. I considered this guy Doug in college who hated me because I stole his boyfriend. Boyfriend was tall and (debatably) good-looking. It wasn't a lasting or profound affair. Doug's year-long retaliation, a series of orchestrated attacks in social situations (plus blind items in the school paper), seemed a bit much. Especially considering the fact that our college was two-thirds women! How could he blame me alone for picking up a free agent switchhitter? His piece de resistance, as I recall, was dumping a cup of beer on me at a party, after which I defiantly danced to MC Luscious' "Boom I Fucked Your Boyfriend" right in front of him and inwardly plotted revenge I don't think was ever realized.

But that didn't feel right either. Anyhow, I finally picked my Anti-Valentine recipient. You'll see.

I'm really pleased at the variety and spectacular perversity of the contributions. Thanks all!

dear pee-intine
by Norma Metcalfe

you wet my bed
then you fled
now what the fuck do i do
with my futon?

Treyf
by Anonymous

First we were roommates. She was funny, blonde, a vaudeville-type performer. We became a couple. She kept telling me about her yeast. I'm thinking, It's because you don't wash. I thought I could deal: certain deeds on good days, you know?

But she'd come home at three a.m. from a show, her feet black--like the DOT had just been through--smelling like alcohol, cigarettes, weed, and sweat (she never washed her show clothes). Still wearing her pasties. She'd bring the stink to bed. Four days later, she'd still be wearing the pasties and the stink. Meaning she hadn't bathed. Then she'd want sex. I'd be all like: Skank. I'm not putting my lips anywhere below your chin.

She once cleaned out her purse on the floor, leaving a hefty pile of cracker crumbs next to the bed of house guests. It stayed there the whole weekend they were in town: a brown pyramid of food.

When the sinks got full--two sinks, since it was a kosher-built kitchen--instead of washing up she'd just put all the dirty dishes in the freezer. The day I moved out there was a half-eaten bowl of soup, on a plate, in the freezer, frozen with the spoon still in it.

Disappeared valentines
by Anne Apestic Foote

Before the tubes were tied
I tried each method that was possible -
The IUD so painful,
Pills that gave me pimples.
The worst, the diaphragm, spring loaded,
jumped and skidded across the bed -
Amid dust bunnies landed.
All to avoid the ties that bind
To lovers who, while fuck-worthy,
Were not the type I'd settle with.
All gone now, even from memory.

Quid pro quo
by Tony Hightower

Clarice was a something-slash-something from Westchester who'd just gotten out of some fraught As-The-Stomach-Turns thing with someone twice her age. I met her through a bunch of stoner friends I had at the time, which would have been strike two (or three, or seven), sure, but of course, only in retrospect.

She was a flame-haired hood ornament with eyes you could skate on and aspirations toward theater, and one night I stumbled out of the C3 bar with her on my arm, and shockingly enough, neither of our soused selves had better plans at 3:15 am on a Friday night, so one thing led to another, and that began what wound up being a few wasted months trying to "communicate."

Don't let anyone tell you that for guys, all sex is good. I'm way more beggar than chooser, but I can't believe someone with as many chances to learn as she had could be so utterly awkward. Seriously, she made Annie Hall look like Krystal Steal. Eh, fuggit, it was probably me.

She's since actually achieved a sort of fame for being in a string of herpes ads. Me, I got out with my health and my dignity. I guess.

Blood spatter
by Phil Campbell

She was a medical examiner in a mid-sized Southern city, a doctor who hated people so much she switched to studying cadavers. She would call me at work to tell me about the "great farming accident" she had seen, shutting up and closing herself off only when the homicide involved babies in plastic bags. She loved blood spatter, Neil Young, and late-afternoon trysts. At night we drove stoned through the city looking for parties with people she had known since grade school, who would crack the same jokes they probably told in high school. And for three months she held me absolutely spellbound. But I couldn't contain her, control her, give her enough room, or figure her out, and my needs were snarled with their own near-fatal neuroses and contradictions. My revenge on her was to call her crazy until she reached for a kitchen knife (I shudder to think how specifically she saw my veins and arteries working under my sweat-stained t-shirt).

We met drunk and we abandoned each other drunk, and all I can say is that I'm glad I didn't black out for any of it.

Penny
by Gail

My Anti-Valentine goes out to a little girl named "Penny", who I haven't seen since the fourth grade. Her eyes were as sky-blue as crayon, and her blonde hair fell straight past her shoulders, with thick flattering bangs a la Muffet's Secret Dollhouse.

On what was probably the worst day ever, my friend "Annie" approached me to tell me a secret. She leaned into my ear and whispered that Penny didn't really like me, and Annie had promised to keep it a secret. I went up to Penny in the schoolyard later that day, and asked if we were still friends. After swearing up and down that she "really really" was my friend, I revealed that Annie had told me their secret. Penny froze, then looked away and muttered, "I told her not to say anything." That's when I opened up my Holly Hobby backpack, took out my metal compass that up to that point I had only used for drawing circles, and stabbed Penny in the face.

After that day, it didn't bother me so much that Penny didn't like me. Who'd want a friend with a bloody hole in her face anyway?

He stopped tolerating her today
by Tom

The first time I was alone with Karen it was awkward and gross. When she got on the elevator with me, I tried to be friendly and say hello. She didn't answer me. She stared ahead, breathing loudly through her nose, picking absent-mindedly one of the hundreds of scabs on her arms instead. She was short and disheveled with unkempt black hair and a pale complexion, but, if she were wearing long sleeves, she could be seen as cute in a truly geeky kind of way (as opposed to the faux-geeky, ironic chic that was still in its infancy in 1999). I assumed, as did everyone else who met her that week, that she was a cutter, but as it happened, Karen just had a cat who hated her and attacked her every night in her sleep.

Karen would say things that were odd at best ("I used to love to drink ketchup") or hilariously fucking insane at worst ("There's a squirrel in my neighborhood that hates me") and we would laugh and try to convince her that she was crazy and that no one else got upset because their parents wouldn't let them sleep with them in the same bed anymore. It was all very cute and entertaining and enjoyable enough that I actually grew to like her, hung out with her occasionally and even fixed her up with a friend of mine. Life was so fucking easy at the time and she was so sweet and quirky–what could possibly go wrong?

It was the third time that Karen dissolved into hysterical crying in a restaurant–because she had realized that her grandmother was getting old and would one day die–that I realized that I had to get out. Her act was turning out to not be an act after all, and her bizarre statements, like how she'd literally throw up if she ever found another person's hair on her clothes, or what my friend one night in bed (“Don't feel bad, all women hate sex") were wearing me down. She was taking me on her endless Bataan Death March of pointless fear ("You can't sit on my bed in those pants! You wore them on the bus!") and demented theories on how life works ("Everyone walks down the street holding hands with their parents when they're 33") every time I spent five minutes with her and I couldn't do it any more.

After two weeks of trying to fade into the background, Karen came up to my desk on afternoon. "Do you know what I've been doing for the past hour?" she asked me, her lip quivering. When I told her, truthfully, that I couldn't begin to imagine, she said, "I've been tapping my foot under my desk so that you'll be my friend again." Then she started crying. Again. And she begged me not to stop being friends with her.

Despite the fact that I have no empathy whatsoever and have eliminated the part of me that cares at all about other people, I felt sorry for Karen. For a while. So I pretended to not hate her for another week or two and was finally saved by the collapse of our company both of us being scattered to the Winds of Unemployment. The last time I saw her she was buying toilet paper in bulk.

EPILOGUE: A friend of mine does a good deal of freelance work for Karen, so I still hear the good Karen Story now and then, like how she was so excited that a meeting at her new office went well that she grabbed a woman in the hallway and kissed her full on the mouth and couldn't understand why said woman got "all upset" about it.

Hurricane Katrina
by Dana

My neighbor in college--a girl from the bayous named (I shit you not) Katrina--would appear on my doorstep daily, Schneider-like, to bend my ear, always with terrible news. Sometimes it was because she had rescued half-dead cats. Sometimes it was because the half-dead cats had peed on her bed. Sometimes it was because of her frequent arguments with her new boyfriend, Joseph, a refugee from the Ivory Coast, who worked at the local ghetto grocery store where they locked him in at night to restock and paid him two dollars an hour. (She would always make up with him later.) I can't say I minded the distraction, because I was doing everything I could to avoid writing my thesis. But she came one day with the bad news ne plus ultra. She was pregnant. Yes, in summation, she was having unprotected sex with a dude from The People's Democratic Republic of AIDS, she got pregnant, she decided to get married to this dude, the one who made two bucks an hour, much to the chagrin of her folks (I can't even imagine how Thanksgiving went that year) and the suspicion of INS. I pleaded with her not to do this--it was more effort than I'd put into our friendship all those months combined. She didn't listen, of course, and moved across town into a moldy basement apartment. Anyhow, I graduated and left town before the baby was born. A few months later, she sent me a photo in the mail of a really funny-looking kid. On the back she had written his name and birthweight and height, and then, underneath, Yes, he really is that hairy! (By the way, the exclamation point was dotted with a heart.)

Addendum heartonastick was too full of Ziggy love to contribute, but you should go read his post anyhow.