“When you see me out, just walk away like you don’t even know me!” Click.

And like that, my ‘first LA girlfriend’ became my ‘first LA ex-girlfriend.’ Thus begins the arduous physical task of deliberately avoiding certain places and the more arduous mental task of sanding down the edges on certain vivid memories so that their facsimiles (i.e. a perch off Kirkwood on the 4th of July) can become, once again, just another neutral location on a map.

To make the dumping worse, the ‘break up’ argument was carried in a bad reception area. So we were breaking up… WHILE we were breaking up. I must have looked batguana crazy pacing around Runyon Canyon looking for the satellite sweet spot yelling: “No, no, that’s such BS, I never said that! That’s a bunch of crap!… Hold on, let me climb up on this rock… Can you hear me now? GOOD — SCREW YOU!”

Right as I got to the bottom of the canyon, the reception improved and she leveled her zingers, as if they had been lying in wait for the perfect moment of electromagnetic clarity. “Do LA a favor and move back to New York. And if you stay – when you see me out, just walk away like you don’t even know me!”

Call ended. Not a ‘disconnect,’ clearly a hang up.

I looked at my 8900 Blackberry Curve like it was some cryptex which held answers as to the exact nature of the call and the subsequent hang up. Although, technically, I guess you don’t ‘hang up’ cell phones. I think we need a new phrase like: ‘That bitch red-buttoned me!’

I stood at the base of Runyon Canyon and just stared at the placid home screen like if I gazed at it long enough, it would transmogrify and say, “Hey, she’s just hurt and working out childhood issues. She still loves you, dude!”

However, I knew that this time was, indeed, the last time I would get ‘red-buttoned’ in this relationship. It was over. I continued my still and silent vigil for several more minutes with my stubborn phone. Runners keeping six-pack shape for their ‘big break’ looked at my crestfallen form and avoided it like the canyon’s ubiquitous dog poop. I was so not in line with ‘The Secret!’ I looked up, vaguely noticing the near full moon and mockingly perfect LA weather (even the gentle breeze seemed to torment me) and thought about my journey since arriving in LA early February…

When I first got to LA, I was desperate. The smothering loneliness of the town turned me into a serial (and incredibly impatient) dater. I perfunctorily made out with lots of faces and ran up an impressive credit card debt, at least by Capital-One-no-hassles-credit-rating-of-620 standards. I was becoming convinced LA was just not my town and I would never meet a girlfriend much less (dare I even say it?) a soul mate.

Then I met Julianne.

From the moment I saw her, I knew I was in trouble. My brain, heart, and penis all huddled together and decided that THIS was the woman I should become retarded for. She was (still is, I’m sure) 6 feet 1 inch tall (when not slouching), auburn hair, amber eyes, porcelain skin, with the hanger angles of a Milan runway model, and the stylish yet slightly muted fashion sense of a young and fresh LA club kid; this all juxtaposed nicely with the mysterious and easy smirk of a woman who had been there and, yes, had done that.

One time, a guy came up to her at a club (guys would hit on her in front of me all the time) and said, “Hey beautiful – you’re really tall.” She just looked at the guy coolly and said, “Not really… for a man.” This just made me spiral further into retardation.

Despite her obvious appeal, she kind of stood against the grain of my exes of yesteryear. I tended to like dancers and curvy chicks (no, not girls with spina bifida, you freaks!); girls with a little junk in the trunk. Sometimes, I was even okay with junk in the kitchen or junk in the attic. At times, I’ve even been know to be okay with junk in the neighbor’s yard. My philosophy was always ‘the more cushion for the pushin’!’ But Julianne was over 6 feet, under 120 pounds and I was in love, so I had to temporarily change it to ‘the more bone for the bonin’!’

I used to joke that she was 120… not 120 pounds, but she only had one 20 in her purse because she never had to pay for shit! And it was true. Everywhere we went, men stared at her like dying carp. One time, a friend came into town and wanted to go to a cool place with an ‘open bar.’ I responded, ‘That’s easy — just take a right down this street here and when you get to the corner turn… into Julianne.’

Celebrities like Wilder Dabillderama (spelling?) and Leonardo DiCaprio would hit on her just because it was Tuesday. I took it in stride knowing that we had fallen madly and fervently in love and that all the fliration and BS in the world wouldn’t cockblock the motha effin’ ‘L’ word!

As irony would have it, jealousy got the better of her. She dug through my emails, my text messages, my voice messages, my Facebook messages, my MySpace messages, and probably, my skid-marked drawers, until she garnered up enough scraps of quasi-evidence to seal up her leaky ship of suspicion. I guess if you dig long enough and you want to find something specifically, you’ll find it… generally. Although she was a near professional flirt at clubs, apparently virtual flirting convincingly trumps actual flirting. Who knew?

And like that, it was done. No face to face. No hug goodbye. No slow dance and fade to black. No leaving on a jetplane. Just her leaving behind some harsh phone calls and flimsy accusations. I was left — metaphorically, and every other kind of –ically — with my dick in my hand.

My emotionally stunted friend Don tried to console me by saying, “Well, you got your LA starter girlfriend out of the way! Everyone needs an LA starter girlfriend!” The fact that he told me this as we sipped on iced green teas at Coffee Bean next to guys wearing Ed Hardy shirts made me wanna choke to death on a tapioca ball.

I tried to laugh about the ’starter girlfriend’ comment for his sake, but it was cold comfort for the familiar ache in my heart. It was, and is, the same Proustian ache that stretches back over decades and dully throbs whenever I remember how, in third grade, Mike Attilis asked Fay Hanley to ‘go with’ him and she said ‘ok.’ I couldn’t even eat my rectangle pizza in the cafeteria that sad day.

Same ache. Years haven’t deadened a single nerve ending.

I look at my phone and shake it like it’s Rihanna and I’m Chris. It isn’t giving up shit. The burgeoning breeze rustles through the palm trees, but only manages to go around my body and the ache that is consuming it like a rapid cancer.

I delete her as a contact from my phone and put it in my sweat jacket pocket… futilely hoping that the order of the digits in her number hasn’t emblazoned itself on my brain forever.

I know it’s time to go home, alone, so I head south from Runyon Canyon onto Fuller Ave.

I also know I am unable to feel worse than this. Then I step in the ubiquitous dog shit.

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