Summer House Recap: Just for Kicks
So far this season I have started each recap discussing how West and Jesse Solomon (always both names!) have no boundaries with each other, but this episode we need to talk about someone else who doesn’t have boundaries: the show’s producers. I’m totally with Gabby. They made her go to New Jersey for Carl’s Soft Bar event and made her go play kickball in the afternoon sun in the same week? No. Uh-uh. No way. Couldn’t be me. As a New Yorker, you never go to a party on a boat or on a bus for the same reason: If that party is terrible, then you are trapped. What’s even worse about a bus party in New Jersey is that your whole evening is blown. You can’t stop off for dinner on the way home. You can’t peel off and go with your besties for a nightcap. No, you are going to some suburban house in Dirty Jerz, you are drinking a bunch of mocktails, and then you are going home to your air-conditioning and an episode of Love Island. That is it.
As for kickball, okay, sure, I would have gone. But the moment things get competitive, I’m out. Did you see West diving to catch a ball and then doing like three rolls after catching it? No. Uh-uh. No way. Couldn’t be me. Just watching it caused me to break out in homosexual hives. My sporting career was much more similar to Lindsay’s and Lexi’s. The one season I played T-ball I just wanted to stand in the infield gossiping while the try-hards all around me actually like, you know, ran and caught the ball and shit. That looks like so much work. The surprising MVP of the game, however, was Imrul, who caught just about every ball that came his way. I knew that Imrul would catch something this summer, but I didn’t think it would be a big red ball.
Okay, okay, I joke about Imrul being slutty (complimentary), but just because someone is sex positive doesn’t mean that they’re actually out there catching STIs. Maybe he’s doing the right thing and wearing condoms? Maybe he’s like the modern gay dude and is on a combination of PrEP and DoxyPEP? All I’m saying is that lots of sex doesn’t mean diseases. I’ve been an absolute ho for months at a clip and caught nothing, but then I’ve been celibate for six months and the first time off the bench, bam, it’s chlamydia. All I’m saying is stay safe out there, and let’s not assume that promiscuity is necessarily diseased.
Damn, when did I become Mr. DeSantis, my high-school health teacher, instead of Dame Brian Moylan, reality-television recapper? Should we talk about the fucking show already?
We start with Carl’s Soft Bar party in New Jersey, which features a lot of strangers, including Bailee, who died on Instagram and whose spirit has become a living Reel. We also got a glimpse of Jasmine from Summer House: Martha’s Vineyard, and, honestly, justice for that show. Also popping up is Carl’s mom, Sharon, who has a little chat with Jesse and West (Jest? Wesse?) and says that Lindsay was mean to her in the past and that she thinks Carl has taken the high road this whole time and Lindsay hasn’t. Damn, Sharon is getting all up in here!
Not much happens at the party, but it does seed some activity that plays out later. Imrul tells Bailee that Jesse Solomon got his toe sucked during a threeway the weekend before, Gabby and Paige tell Jesse that everyone saw him flirting like crazy with Ciara and that he’d better say something to Lexi, and, most importantly, Gabby has a conversation with Lil, Carl’s new lemur lover who admits to making her own outfits out of safety pins and delusion, like she’s LaLaRi in a Drag Race sewing challenge.
Lindsay was invited to Carl’s event but says she would rather stay at home and paint her walls and watch them dry. Solid joke, Lindz. A+. Carl was right to invite her and she was right not to go; that is how the dance of exes on the same show should work. (Same goes for Ciara skipping West’s kickball game.) But the way that Lindsay and Carl are each handling the bust-up of Larl is very different. Carl has yet to say a bad word about Lindsay, as his mother pointed out, but Lindsay sure is taking up against Carl.
I am of the opinion that the end of their relationship was a bullet dodged. They were clearly wrong for each other and they both behaved in terrible ways that hurt the other. I would consider this breakup no-fault and best for all parties involved, including us sitting at home. So why did Linds have to go so hard against Carl when talking about the event to Gabby? “I don’t need to celebrate you talking about doing something in the future,” Lindsay says. “It’s still an inaction, and he wasted even more money.” She might be right. No one from the cast is bullish on the long-term prospects of the endeavor. (Paige says it best: “If we can be supportive of Kyle being a DJ, we can be supportive of Carl’s bar with no alcohol.”) But Lindsay is out of this relationship, she has a new boyfriend, she’s pregnant. Why is she so upset about this? Carl is no longer her problem. Let him fail in every way he can conceive and just sit smugly on the sidelines and make a knowing shrug and grin as the “For Lease” sign shows up in Soft Bar’s window.
What’s more curious is how upset she is about Lil’s comments to Gabby. (Is Carl dating a girl named Lil just so he can hold onto the Larl portmanteau? Maybe.) So Lil says that Carl met her whole family at a soccer game and then she slid into his DMs. Gabby asks a follow-up about when the game was and Lil said it was last summer, meaning that Carl met her family at the game when he was still with Lindsay. When Gabby tells Lindsay this, Linds says that before they broke up she saw Carl looking at a DM with a phone number and he clicked away fast. She is convinced that he was talking to Lil before they even broke up, which means he was lying when he said he went into their breakup conversation not knowing what he was going to do. She also misuses the term gaslighting, but that’s more common these days than getting the clap from your first hookup in a year.
This is a dereliction of duty on both Gabby and Lindsay’s parts, because we have not been presented with enough information to really know what happened. Gabby needed more follow-ups. The nature of the DMs, when it turned sexy, was it consistent or did Carl come back after the breakup? Come on, Gabby. You have one job!
What we do know is that Carl and Lil, while talking, have not even been on a date yet. Also, Carl could have met her dad at the game and said he is on a reality show. Lil’s dad says, “Oh, my daughter wants to be a reality-TV show producer. Would you talk to her?” Carl says yes, she DMs, sends the number, it’s totally innocent. There are a lot of different scenarios where Carl could have been talking or DMing with an adult woman and it had nothing to do with dating or sex. I DM gay dudes all day long and it’s just fart jokes, Shawn Mendes underwear ads, and prolonged discussions about the small changes in Madonna’s face over time. There is a world in which all of this is innocent.
Or not! It could be what Lindsay says it was and that is bad. Her biggest problem is that Carl is pretending like he’s the victim in this and that he hasn’t moved on when he was already talking to girls before they broke up. I’m sorry, but this is no worse than what Lindsay is currently doing. First of all, the timeline with the new BF is quick. Even without the pregnancy, she jumped back on the horse fast. Secondly, Lindsay is pretending to be so over it. She has a new man and a baby on the way — she wants us to think Carl doesn’t bother her at all. Meanwhile she’s bad-mouthing his business and is still upset that he may or may not have text-cheated on her while they were together. Just as they were both bad in the relationship, maybe they are both bad in the breakup, laying the entire thing at each other’s feet when we both know that their relationship was always a pact of mutually assured destruction.
Speaking of people who have handled things badly, Jesse Solomon is in a doghouse entirely of his own making. After the New Jersey party he texted Lexi about Ciara to say that everyone thinks he was flirting with Ciara, but he wasn’t really and it’s no big deal. Lexi says that she has never seen him flirt with Ciara so she wasn’t even thinking about it. Um, duh. He’s not going to flirt with Ciara in front of Lexi. Even Jesse isn’t that oblivious.
What he didn’t tell her about, however, was the toe sucking, even after they made it official and had sex for the first time. That sex was off-camera, mind you. See, Imrul? It can be done. At the kickball game, the boys and girls are chatting in separate groups like it’s a sixth-grade dance. Paige shares the tea that Imrul had a threesome the week before, then Lindsay says that Jesse went into the room with them. Then Bailee says that Jesse got his toe sucked. At this point, the worst part is not the toe sucking; it’s that Jesse didn’t tell her and that she had to hear it from other people. And not just one. It’s like everyone knew about it but her, which not only makes her worry about Jesse but also makes her feel stupid. I don’t know much about straight dating, but I think a good rule of thumb (or toe) is to never make your girl feel stupid.
Even worse is what Lindsay tells Lexi while they’re cosplaying me at my T-ball game in the infield. She tells Lexi the gossip that Jesse and Ciara talked about how Jesse might have taken a shot for Ciara if she didn’t meet West first. When Jesse sits down to talk to Lexi after the game, he says the whole thing is like a joke, a non-event. Then Lexi hits him with, “Like you telling Ciara that if she didn’t date West last year that you would probably be together?” Gagged. Gooped. Gopped. Other words starting with G. Gobsmacked! That’s what Jesse was. He thought it was gonna be one thing and it was totally something else and he got both ambushed and served with just one sentence.
As Jesse sat there, with the blades of dried grass imprinting into his calf flesh, he listened to the other team gathering their belongings, hanging their heads about the fact that they were just defeated by a bunch of reality-television hooligans. He couldn’t even enjoy the sunshine or the grass or the slight summer breeze or that feeling of brow sweat rapidly drying or his victory, because he had fucked up and he knew it. He apologized a little, but mostly he felt bad, and Jesse Solomon is not good at bad feelings, just like he’s not good at commitment or boundaries or being careful with girls’ hearts. But he’s learning. He’s trying. He wants to make the best with Lexi. And as he extended his hand to help her up with a big pull, one so hard she popped up into the air and levitated a little bit, he wanted her to look at everything, his sweat-soaked shirt, their friends, the sunshine, the trees groaning in the heat — absolutely anywhere except his feet.