A steady job can be sexy

Many of my peers are purchasing real estate these days. They’re throwing big fancy weddings and buying houses in the country. They’re investing in mutual funds, making homemade cat food and renovating their starter homes so they can look for larger ones. I have always sneered at their domesticity, vowing that I would never settle down, because for me settling down really meant settling.

My girlfriends and I, by contrast, are much more interested in checking out the latest rock band than finding a nice doctor or lawyer. We’re educated, motivated, with aspirations of high art. We congregate in the smokier lounges of Silver Lake, Los Feliz and Echo Park, cheap beer in hand, surveying the room for prey, and manage to turn dating into a form of protest performance art.

The last guy I dated before my current beau was an “artist” -- we’ll use that term loosely. He was tall, dark and handsome and approached me in the smoking room of a Silver Lake bar, stuffing a piece of paper into my hand. So what if it was only a hastily scrawled haiku? He was inspired to write poetry for me, a girl he had noticed across the bar because I was chain smoking and looking bored.

I was entranced by his fly-by-night nature, the black leather journal he kept in his back pocket, his hole-in-the-wall apartment where he painted on the walls and didn’t even have a lease. He rolled his own cigarettes and went to New York for a vacation with only $50 in his pocket.

He was interested in me, a Connecticut Yankee of whom the most commonly voiced criticism was that I was uptight, whose last fling was with a British stockbroker.

After a few weeks with him, my inhibitions dissolved like the last ice cube at the bottom of an empty vodka tonic. Soon we were sneaking in to speakeasys where you had to know the password, jumping on abandoned mattresses on Long Beach sidewalks at 3 a.m., groping each other in Hollywood nightclubs.

My friends accused me of having “Lisa Vision,” of not seeing the whole picture, of missing reality.

And the reality was this -- that my own personal Michelangelo, like so many others in Los Angeles, was a mirage, a false watering hole in a desert of pinstriped suitors. The starving artist as a partner is a cold comfort.

I see it happening all over the city. Girls like me pursue their antithesis. These wandering troubadours tell us that we don’t get it, that we never got it, and we buy it. We believe that, compared with these modern-day beatniks, we’ve been wasting our lives regurgitating the philosophies of the man!

But the day comes, and usually sooner than later, when reality hits you on the head like a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor. You look at the so-called boring lives of your domesticated friends and realize what they are really missing.

They don’t have to drive their boyfriend to the DMV to get his car out of the impound; they don’t have to explain to their parents that his graffiti arrest was a misdemeanor, a technicality really; they don’t have to buy their boyfriend a $3 burrito because he hasn’t eaten all day.

Starving artists are a blast to hang out with, cool to be seen with, but when you have a cold and your boyfriend is too busy drawing with a Sharpie on his kitchen wall to make you chicken soup, the world can be a lonely place.

If our moms weren’t lying to us and the modern woman truly can “have it all,” then there has to be a compromise. He has to be out there, the male version of us. Someone who pays his bills, registers his vehicle and makes sure his rent check will clear, all while composing the next great sonata or filming the next great short. The challenge is to find the artistic types with something to share besides pretty words and abstract dreams.