"Oh be quiet. Just fill it up and check the oil," Everyone laughed. I thought Conan calling me a gas station attendant was a witty comeback and I was having fun. We finished the interview without further incident and I left thinking everything was fine, not knowing I had been so "abrasive and confrontational" as to acquire a lifetime ban.

That all happened in 1996. Two years before I ever met Liza. At some point during our relationship I told her the Conan story. Being in advertising and not in show business she had never met him and although she liked his show, she sided with me out of allegiance.

I proposed to Liza the Tuesday before the millennium. I wanted to do it on New Year's Eve but I couldn't wait. I had gotten the ring. A simple elegant antique thing from the Hasidim on 46th Street in the Diamond District on Monday and it was burning a hole in my pocket. Once I had decided she was the one, I didn't want to wait another second. Fuck the drama of asking at midnight on the most exciting night in the last thousand years, a rainy Tuesday at 9:47 a week before was the perfect moment. I loved her so.

The first time I ever saw Liza was in a hallway in the office building where she worked in Seattle, (I was there screening Fall at the Seattle Film Festival, which she was working for along with her advertising job) and I thought to myself, "That's the woman I'm going to marry." I had never said anything like that to myself before.

I walked down the hall and asked her to lunch. She turned beet red and without saying a word retreated into her office.

"Is that a "yes?"

"Sure."

We went to lunch and had a second date while I was in town. She told me she didn't want a relationship but before my plane landed in NY the following night, I had a message on my machine from her, thanking me for the dates and saying she hoped we saw each other again. Of course I made that happen.

Our first kiss was on the fake Brooklyn Bridge at New York, New York in Las Vegas on our third date. It was perfectly kitsch. I loved it, except the kiss itself had zero chemistry, which concerned me. It was a portending of our lack of chemistry which I was afraid of but I fell in love with her none the less. I told her that night that there was something I had thought the first time I saw her that I would reveal to her at some point in the future. It was the line about wanting to marry her.

On the Tuesday I proposed, I rushed into her house, giddy with excitement and fear. On the second floor of her building I stopped, got quiet and prayed, just wanting a confirmation. "Dear God, should I ask Liza to marry me right now?" I waited for the answer.

Be still and know that I am God.

"Yes." That's what I heard. Loud and clear.

"Yes."

I resumed racing up the stairs. She was waiting for me in her doorway as usual, a quizzical look on her face. She had been away on business for a week and it was her first night back but still I seemed more enthusiastic to see her than usual, having called her to say that I had to come over right away.

"What's up with you?" I was jittery and giggle-laughing uncontrollably in a manic way, unable to catch my breath. Liza was almost worried. She had never seen me like this.

"Eric?! What's going on?"

I leaned in and whispered in her ear. "Do you love me?"

"Of course."

"More than ever?"

"Yes, honey. More than ever."

"Do you remember in Las Vegas on our third date when I told you that I had something to tell you that I thought when I first saw you in Seattle that I would one day tell you?"

"Yeah?"

"You know what it was?"

"What's going on? You're kinda of freaking me out."

"When I first saw you I thought to myself, 'that's the woman I'm going to marry.'" She pulled away so she could see my face. I had tears running down both cheeks.

"Awwww, honey, that's so sweet." She still didn't get it. Trying not to just start sobbing uncontrollably, I knelt on one knee. She gasped.

"What are you doing?!" She covered her mouth with her hand, started smiling this weird nervous smile and started muttering, "no, no, no, no, no" and hit both knees so she was eye level with me.

I choked out the words, trying to breathe in between and not cry.

"Will... you... marry... me?"

"Really?" Not the response I was looking for but I went with it.

"Yeah."

She just looked at me with this scared smile frozen on her face. Five seconds went by, which when waiting for an answer to that question, is a fuck of a long time.

"You have to say yes or no."

"Ummmmm.... Yes?" Again, if ever you don't want a question mark at the end of a yes, it would be now but I let her slide, thinking she was just completely freaked out. I took out the black box and opened it up. She was loosing it. I went to put the ring on her finger and that's when she did the weird sudden retracting of her hand thing. Then the "talk" and it was over.

The exact moment I clicked onto Conan's show that night, he was doing a sketch. He was having some random New York advertising company come up with an ad for a bed store in Houston or something like that. They panned the room of ad executives and THERE WAS LIZA. I couldn't believe it. I was stunned and confused and had a really bad feeling. After not seeing her since I had been on one knee with tears in my eyes asking her to marry me and her saying no, there she was on the Conan O'Brien show. And then, a week later, I bumped into her in Times Square. She didn't want to talk. She said it was "inappropriate to have a personal conversation in the middle of the street." This was coming from a woman who was taught it was inappropriate to hold hands in public. I, on the other hand, am a bit of a freak so, yeah, we were ill-suited in that and many areas and though I meant my proposal profoundly, in retrospect, I'm grateful she said no.

I told her that sometimes you have to have conversations in places you don't think it's "appropriate to have them."

"I quit my job," she said with an apologetic smile.

"So when are you moving back to Seattle?"

"I'm not. I got a new one here." I was speechless.

"I thought you said you hated New York."

"Does it really matter where I live?"

"When your reason for not wanting to marry me after saying you wanted to for two years was because you wanted to move away so you wouldn't have to carry baby carriages up subway steps. Yeah, it matters."

"I don't want to have this discussion here." She started to walk away.

"And what the fuck were you doing on the Conan O'Brien show?!"

She disappeared into a sea of people.

Three months later I read on Page Six that she and Conan were engaged. I guess they met when he randomly picked her firm to do the skit.

"Happy Thanksgiving," I said out loud even though it was July and I was alone in a Motel 6 In Hyde Park at my first yoga retreat ever. That's what I say when I really want to say something evil. One year during a Thanksgiving Day football telecast, Chris Collingsworth, ex player turned commentator, witnessed a player making a bonehead mistake.

"It's Thanksgiving my friends. I'm not gonna say anything bad about anyone today. All I'm gonna say is Happy Thanksgiving." It's worked well for me in all seasons.

After Liza cried about me being a gambler, I went home and eventually won the auction at $26,500 and got to play Clyde. It was out of control. I was pump faking the man who invented the pump fake, or at least made it cool. I was hitting fade aways from the left baseline on the playground of my dreams. I beat him 11-9. Fair and square. He missed a lot of shots but I hit two threes. NBA threes. From behind the arc on the Madison Square Garden floor. On a rainy Monday afternoon with a janitor, a couple of Knicks PR guys and a photographer watching. The Garden was filled to capacity in my mind and they roared as loudly as they did when Willis came out that night thirty years ago. A "dream come true" doesn't begin to tell the story. No words could. On my bench were three people. My mom, who video taped it. Patty, who thought it was the coolest thing in the world. And my publicist Liza, who bore the same name as my ex, so I guess she was represented after all. I kept the towel Clyde tossed me to dry off with after the contest and have a bus stop sized poster of him smiling, backing me down in the post, trash talking as he goes, on my living room wall.

Normally, when there isn't a Knicks game on during Sunday football, eating and phone calls with friends take me up to kick off at one. Then it's watching, napping, Nerve whoring, jerking off, napping, maybe a dominatrix or a special massage girl, and the four o'clock games. They end at 7ish. I take a walk down Broadway to clear my head and then the night ESPN game at eight-thirty. After that is Sports Center and the highlights of all the games I've watched all day. I have satellite so I see parts of all of them live, but the Sunday ritual would be incomplete without the highlight show. Oh yeah, and before Sports Center there's time for the girlfriend check in call. If I have a girlfriend. Which I don't now. And haven't had since Liza

Posted by Eric Schaeffer at 9:11 AM

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