“I am super sorry about that. I probably shouldn’t have kept serving him beers,” she said.
I turned and saw that the voice belonged to a waitress named Sarah. She was tall and thin, with short blond hair, and her breasts were tucked into her Hooters uniform in a way that created a shelf below her chin that she could probably set her car keys on if she needed free hands. She had been fairly quiet in the month that I had worked there; my only interaction with her had been a week before, when she asked me if we were out of baked beans. But she did so politely and with a pretty smile.
“It’s no big deal,” I said, suddenly realizing how impossible it was to look cool while cleaning up vomit.
“I’ll buy you a beer afterward. Actually, I have a six-pack in my car. We can drink them at the beach if you get off soon,” she said.
After Sarah went back to work, I ran downstairs to Dan, who was up to his elbows in batter, lathering up raw chicken wings.
“Guess who asked me to drink beers with her after work?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But Bob just handed me my paycheck. Eighty-three hours, after taxes, guess how much? Two hundred and forty-two dollars. For eighty-three fucking hours, dude. I almost cried. I seriously almost cried. I hate this fucking job. I blame you,” he said, pulling a chicken wing out of the batter and hurling it against the wall.
“Are you still mad, or can I talk now?” I asked.
“I’m done. So which girl asked you to have beers?”
“Guess.”
“I don’t know. Sarah?”
“How’d you know that?”
“ ’Cause they’re all named Sarah.”
I described which Sarah I meant, and how the conversation had gone down, as he battered the wings.
“Well, I’m actually not able to be happy right now, but if I were, I’d be happy for you,” he said.
I couldn’t wait for work to end. I was so excited that I didn’t even mind it when Bob made me clean the Dumpster outside filled with rancid chicken wings.
Around midnight, after I finished cleaning out the oil in the fryers, Sarah and I made our way down to her Honda Civic and grabbed the six cans of warm Natty Ice she had rolling around in her backseat. We sat on the cement wall of the boardwalk looking out at the ocean and cracked the beers open and began drinking. I smelled like raw chicken, flour, and vomit. After a few moments of silence, though, I began to panic: here I was again, sitting next to a woman, with no idea how to talk to her.
“That guy really threw up everywhere,” I said as an opener.
“Yeah, that was really gross. I’d rather not talk about it,” she replied.
“Totally,” I said.
I decided my only chance at this going well was to stop talking and just go in for a kiss. So I did—until I realized she had a mouthful of beer, and my surprise kiss caused her to cough it up in my face.
“Oh my God, I’m really, really sorry,” I said, patting her on the back as she coughed.
“Wrong pipe,” she said between coughs. Finally she caught her breath. “Let me finish a couple more beers and then we’ll make out, okay?”
She did, and we did. And then we did the same thing the next night, and the night after that. Then make-outs at night turned into hang-outs during the day, and before I knew it we’d been hanging out and making out for about a month. I’d made out with a few girls before her, but I’d never had a consistent make-out partner. I felt like an athlete in the midst of a winning streak; I wasn’t sure why everything was working, but it was and I didn’t want to screw it up.
“You think she thinks you’re her boyfriend?” asked Dan one day at work while we cleaned the stainless-steel prep station in the back of the kitchen.
“I’m not sure. We just kind of only make out, and rent movies and watch them and don’t really talk a bunch. I like her, though. She’s cool,” I said.
“You’ve been hanging out with her a lot, dude. If you like her, you should just ask her if she’s your girlfriend, because if she is, you guys should be having sex, not making out,” Dan said.
“Get some stank on your hang low,” Bob yelled out from the manager’s office, where, evidently, he’d been eavesdropping.
Dan was right. I did like Sarah. She was quiet but very sweet and cute, and we had the same taste in rental movies. And if I liked her, and she liked me, why weren’t we having sex?
That night, when I was at Sarah’s little one-bedroom stucco apartment in Rancho Bernardo, we were making out on her fake leather couch the way we usually did. At one point she got up to get a glass of water and I followed her to the kitchen.
“This is a super-weird question to ask, but do you tell people I’m your boyfriend?” I asked.
She lit up a cigarette and took a few puffs.
“No one has really asked me. But, I mean, I like hanging out with you, so I guess you kind of are,” she said. “We haven’t had sex, though,” she added.
“Yeah, that’s why I thought maybe we weren’t,” I said.
“Well, we can. I just hadn’t ’cause we’d just been hanging out for a couple weeks, and then I’ve been on my period. But why don’t you rent a movie and come over Friday night?”
I could barely sleep the next two nights, I was so excited. I’d spent most of my adolescence fantasizing about sex, and now it was about to happen. I thought about how it might go down. Maybe I’d take off her bra with one hand while saying something cool, but not douchey. Then we’d turn off a couple lights, and go at it for forty-five minutes to an hour, and I’d give her two to three orgasms. The anticipation was killing me. I had struggled with women my whole life; I’d never been comfortable in my own skin, never felt like a man. I just felt like a boy who got older. And, while I didn’t know what the steps were to start to feel like a man, I was sure that having sex must be one of them.
The next day I bounded into work, tossed on my apron, and found Dan cutting limes in the kitchen.
“You didn’t come home last night. You guys do it?” Dan asked.
“No. But she says I’m her boyfriend, and the only reason we haven’t done it is because she’s on her period,” I said proudly.
“That’s why God made the butthole, my friend. One door closes, the other one opens,” Bob chimed in from a few feet away.
That Friday evening, a couple hours before my shift ended, Bob came into the kitchen to let me off early for the night.
“Before you go, though,” he said, “your skinny buddy said you’re about to get your cherry popped.”
I looked angrily behind Bob and spotted Dan trying to hide a smile as he scrubbed the mop sink.
“Let me tell you something,” Bob said earnestly as he put his hand on my shoulder. “I lost my virginity when I was fourteen, on mushrooms, to a two-hundred-pound woman who ran the Laundromat by my dad’s house. Then I spent the next two hours taking a dump in her toilet.”
“Okay.”
“I’m glad I got a chance to tell you that,” he said, then patted me on the back.
I got in my car and drove to the Blockbuster near my apartment, where I rented a copy of A Few Good Men. Sarah had never seen it, and it was one of my favorite movies.
As I drove over to Sarah’s, I was filled with nerves, excitement, and a little bit of nausea. It was the same feeling I’d had when I got up with the bases loaded in the championship game of my last year of Little League. That ended with me getting hit in the stomach with a fastball and puking on home plate. I could only hope that this would end differently.
I got to her apartment shortly before midnight, with a DVD, twelve condoms, and an entire chocolate cake, which seemed like a good idea when I was in the drugstore checkout line, but immediately felt ridiculous as I carried it through Sarah’s front door.
We had a couple beers on her couch, then crawled into her double bed and put on A Few Good Men. Usually, about five minutes into a movie we would start making out and one of us would pause the film. This time, though, I hesitated
to make the first move, because for so long the first move had been the only move. Now there was supposed to be a second move: doing it.
Twenty minutes of the movie went by, then forty, and I still hadn’t done anything. Finally I started kissing Sarah’s neck, then lifted up her shirt. I couldn’t figure out how to unhook her bra, so I pulled it down and awkwardly put my mouth on her boob.
“What are you doing?” Sarah asked.
I popped my head up.
“What?” I asked.
“What are you doing?” she asked again.
“Kissing your boob?”
“Well, it’s just—they’re talking about whether or not Jack Nicholson ordered the code red on that guy,” she said, pointing at the TV screen.
I grabbed the remote and pushed pause.
“There you go. You won’t miss it,” I said.
She grabbed the remote and unpaused the movie.
“I want to see if he ordered the code red,” she snapped.
“He ordered the code red.”
“I don’t think he did.”
“Of course he did. That’s what the whole movie is about. I’ve seen the movie.”
“Geez, well, thanks for ruining it for me!”
“Ruining it for you? They tell you forty-five minutes into the movie that he ordered the code red. The rest of the movie is just about whether or not Tom Cruise can get him to say he ordered the code red.”
“Don’t tell me what the movie’s about! I know what it’s about!”
By now, of course, I had absolutely destroyed any mood there was to begin with, and hurt her feelings in the process. I needed to think of something fast.
“I’m sorry. Do you want some cake?” I asked.
“What?”
“Let’s just watch the movie. I promise I didn’t ruin it for you,” I said.
“Sorry, I’m just into the movie. Why don’t we just have sex right now? That way we can watch the movie afterward and not have to worry about having sex,” she said.
Now that I’m older, it seems like a pretty obvious sign that your relationship isn’t going well if your partner asks you to get sex out of the way so she can finish a movie. At the time, though, it sounded like a perfectly reasonable request and I jumped at her offer.
I pressed pause again, pulled out a condom, and started to open it—first with my hands, then with my teeth, then, finally and frantically, with both teeth and hands, which proved successful. Then I reached over and flipped off the lights, and for about a minute and thirty seconds we had sex. In all the thousands of sexual fantasies I’d had, I only concerned myself with making exactly one person happy: me. But as I rolled around on top of her, like a zombie trying to maul a sleeping camper in a horror film, I fully realized all the pressures that come with having sex with someone. I was supposed to try to make it as good for her as it was for me. I had responsibilities. And it soon became evident—as soon as I realized it would be over very quickly—that I didn’t know what it would take to make things enjoyable for her. Before that night, when I’d heard someone say their first time was disappointing, it had always rubbed me the wrong way, like hearing a millionaire tell you their life is too complicated. But now that I’d had sex, I was disappointed—because I had sucked so badly at it. There was nothing romantic about it.
After I finished, I collapsed on top of her. She tilted her body and I slid off her. She went to the bathroom, then got back in bed and hit the play button on the remote. I was asleep before Jack Nicholson yelled “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!”
The next morning, Sarah left early to pick up her sister from the airport; when I woke up she had already gone. I drove back to my apartment, unsure whether what had happened could be considered a success. When I walked in, Dan was having breakfast.
“You do it?” he asked as soon as I walked in.
“I did it,” I said.
“Let me guess how long. Five minutes?”
“Divided by two . . . and then minus another minute, I think.”
“Look who just became a man!” he said, laughing.
A couple days later, Sarah called me while I was at work. Bob called me into his office and handed me the phone.
“I don’t like personal calls, Skippy,” he said.
“Sorry, I’ll make it quick,” I said, and picked up the phone.
“What’s up?” I said into the receiver.
What was up was, she thought we should break up.
“So, you’re really nice, but I just don’t think I’m going to work at Hooters anymore, and it’ll be hard for us to see each other and stuff,” she said.
“Okay,” I said, trying not to reveal my hurt feelings.
“Okay. Sorry. Could you put Bob back on? I want to tell him where to send my last check.”
I handed Bob the phone.
“She needs to talk to you,” I said.
I turned to walk away.
“Hey,” Bob said, stopping me. He held his hand over the receiver. “Just make sure you remember what she looked like naked so you can jerk off to her later, bud.”
I walked into the kitchen and told Dan the news, trying to hide my embarrassment.
“Well, at least you got to have sex, right?” he said.
I kept waiting for that to register with me, but the truth is, I felt no more like a man than I had felt before I’d had sex.
Bob came out of the office and grabbed a six-pack of Bud Lights.
“We need to have a quick chat. Grab yourself a brewski and come meet me on the upstairs balcony,” he said to me before walking upstairs. “Nothing imported. I got corporate on my ass.”
I grabbed a Bud Light and headed up to the balcony where Bob was sitting at an open table, with the ocean behind him. In the minute I had taken to find a beer and head upstairs, he’d already finished one beer and was halfway through another. I sat down and cracked one open.
“Nothing better on a sunny day than a beer and another dude’s hard-on,” he said.
“What?”
“Just messing with you. I’m not trying to pull any gay stuff on you,” he said, laughing loudly. “Wait, how old are you?” he asked, his laugh immediately ceasing.
“Twenty.”
He yanked the beer from my hands and set it down next to him. “Fuck me. I can’t have underage drinking on the premises. You’re better than that, Bob,” he said to himself before chugging the rest of his open beer.
“What’d you want to talk to me about?”
“Well, I consider the kitchen staff here to be my family . . .” he started.
“What about your wife and kid?”
“Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, the kid’s two. He’s not even a person. And the wife’s the wife. But you guys here, when one of you is cut, I bleed. And I know some girl just gave you a dick up the ass, and I know what that can do to a man. But you’re on a team here, and I need to know that you are still focused and it’s not going to affect your work,” he said.
“Bob, I wash dishes.”
“And you’re one of the three best I’ve ever seen at it. Swear to Jesus. I’m not blowing smoke up your ass. But I’m not going to sit by and watch your skills erode because some woman has got you unfocused,” he said. Then he grabbed the beer he’d confiscated from me and pounded half of it.
“I’ll be focused,” I said.
“Good. Because that’s what a man does. He takes his shots and then he goes back into that dish pit and he scrubs the shit out of some dishes,” he said, standing up and patting me on the back as he walked past me.
I went back to the kitchen, where a mountain of dishes had piled up in my absence. I put on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and turned on the hot water and got to work scrubbing. Bob was wrong: washing a lot of dishes did not make me feel like a man. Right that minute, though, neither did having sex. A rite of passage I’d expected to mean so much had left me feeling no different at all. I had no idea when I would feel like a man, or what it would take. All I could safel
y say was that I was a boy who had had sex, and was really, really good at washing dishes, and that would have to be enough for now.
Give the Rabbit Its Pain Medication
After graduating from college in 2003, armed with a film degree, I moved from San Diego to Los Angeles to pursue a career in screen-writing. Unfortunately, in LA, everyone has a film degree. It’s like owning a toaster, if you had to take out a loan to buy the toaster, and then when it comes time to use the toaster, it doesn’t work. But I was broke and had bills to pay, so while I kept writing screenplays, hoping to break in, I took a job waiting tables at a giant, two-story Italian restaurant in Pasadena called Villa Sorriso, which was decorated with fake plants and generic pictures of Frank Sinatra. I was one of about forty waiters and bartenders, all between the ages of eighteen and thirty, save for one guy in his fifties whom I would often spot standing motionless in the center of the dining hall, lost in thought, with a look on his face that seemed to say, “Next time I need to remember to bring my gun to work so I can open fire on all these assholes.”
Within a week of joining Villa Sorriso’s staff, I came to the conclusion that there are basically three types of employee who work at restaurants in Los Angeles. There are people who want to be actors, people who want to be writers, and people who want to sell drugs to people who want to be actors and writers. And all three of these types usually end up having sex with each other.
I had been working at Villa Sorriso for a few months when the manager hired a new waitress: a cute brunette named Melanie who’d just moved from Colorado to pursue a career in acting. I was assigned to train her and spent a week teaching her the proper way to fold napkins, cut lemons for iced tea, and use the touch-screen computers. After we spent most of our final training day trading our favorite quotes from The Simpsons, I realized I had a thing for her. She was exactly the kind of girl I usually liked: smart, funny, and a little offbeat.
During a slow lunch shift the following week, I was chatting with the restaurant’s bartender, Nick, an aspiring male model who looked a bit like Colin Farrell if he were made of that shiny hard plastic they use to make action figures. “Melanie’s kinda hot, yeah?” I said.
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