My Worst Date

by David Leddick

  “Yours, really. I don’t want to know how much you have or how little. But as a real estate person, I’m rather interested in what you’re doing and whether I think you’re doing the right thing. There are so many barely legal people around Miami Beach I don’t want you falling into the wrong hands. Or maybe you’re one of the barely legal people.”

  Glenn said, “I’m definitely one of the barely legal people, but not when it comes to money. I have a certain amount I’ve pulled together and that you don’t really need to know about. It wasn’t from robbing banks. I like it here, I think I want to stay here, so I’m investing, or investigating really, to see if I can’t make some more money here.”

  I asked him how and he told me he’d been talking to Larry Rodriguez, a recent arrival in town who supposedly had been involved in some big deal property developments up north. What developments he’d been involved in seemed to change a lot depending on whom you were talking to. What made me uneasy about Rodriguez was that he was very present at social events around Miami Beach. Too present. He was trying to establish credibility, I thought. Those too-nice gabardine suits, that too-good car, a Jaguar. Slightly bulging eyes behind his glasses. No real woman in his life, but probably not gay. When there’s nothing really to check out, no clues, that’s one of the biggest clues of all.

  I said, “What are you thinking of doing with Larry Rodriguez? Go in on one of those big Ocean Drive hotels? Like the Amsterdam?”

  “No, Gianni Versace’s buying that. He’s very interested in the Tides. Larry is,” Glenn said. The lobster had come and it was good. Except a single order is enough for a family of four. I put a napkin into the front of my dress. White linen with dark green piping. It’s one of my best looks but somehow I always wear it when there’s a lot of tomato sauce plopping about. I decided to keep my feeling about Larry Rodriguez to myself. Men always think intuition is worth nothing in the marketplace. If the guy’s got a big car and a vague prestigious reputation, that’s quite enough. My theory is that the big problem with guys like Larry Rodriguez who are out to take people to the cleaners is that they always get taken to the cleaners themselves. Their big blind spot is that they are never suspicious of people who are exactly like themselves. You’d think they’d twig onto a charlatan in moments, being one themselves, but they never do. So. I really don’t like the idea of Glenn Elliott being involved with this guy. If he really does have some money.

  I ask, “How about a similar building all on your own?”

  “Do you know of one?” Glenn looks at me instead of his lobster.

  “Glenn, I’m a real estate lady. I know of many.”

  “Any you like?” He’s back to his lobster.

  “Here’s my concept, Glenn. People are buying the big hotels on Ocean Drive with the idea that they’ll renovate superficially and turn around and sell for a big profit. Leaving the hotels to be really renovated by the next owner. That is definitely for somebody who wants to come in, make money, and leave. From what I understand that isn’t your plan. Plus, who knows how fast this boom will move along? If you’re stuck with the hotel and no immediate buyer you have to run a hotel. And that’s complicated. Maybe too complicated and you have to sell at no profit. Or maybe a loss. Or maybe no sale, just sitting there paying the mortgage payments with no income from the hotel. I’m not crazy about this plan for anyone who isn’t already in the hotel business and can survive. It’s actually the next buyer, who really wants a hotel, who’s going to make the money. But a small apartment house, who couldn’t run it? Renovations, you can do them one apartment at a time if you don’t want to spend the money. You’ll always have some income, because these apartments are always rentable at some price. And if Miami becomes the New York of the next century, your property is going to increase in value enormously.”

  “You’ve got this figured out, haven’t you? Why don’t you do this?” Glenn asked me.

  “Because I don’t have any money. But I’m trying. I’m saving my money as best I can. You’ve seen my car. And when I can I’ll make my move and Hugo and I will move into it and fix it up as we can,” I said.

  “Hugo and you can invest in it together,” Glenn said.

  “Whatever money Hugo has he’s keeping for his college,” I told him. “I want him to go to a very good school. He wants to be a writer. He’s got his head on straight, Hugo has. He knows his life is more important than his money.”

  “Thanks to you.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no.”

  “Oh, I think definitely yes, Iris. Definitely yes.”

  “So that’s my plan.”

  “Do you have any buildings in mind for me, Ms. Real Estate Lady?”

  “There’s one I love, not far from the police station on Drexel. Four stories, I think about fourteen or fifteen apartments. A very nice-looking building. Balconies. Asking about three-twenty-five. They’ll take less.”

  “And how much work has to go into it?”

  “Cash, you mean?”

  “No. How much renovation.”

  I told him what I knew, roof seemed good, it was fully occupied. About eight grand a month in rents. We agreed to go over there and take a look the next morning. I don’t know if I was steering him away from Larry Rodriguez, but at least I was beginning to have some idea of what kind of money he had and how smart he was about using it. I’m not planning on marrying this guy but on the other hand I’m not planning on supporting him either.

  macha and ken

  The trouble with life is that nothing ever really happens. Which leaves it sort of up to you to make things happen. Like falling in love. You fall in love and then something is supposed to happen. Right? Except nothing much does. You’re in love and then what? At least with two guys. With a guy and a girl, woman, whatever, I think that’s why there’s the whole ritual of getting engaged, getting married, getting babies, getting bored. At least something happens. You know what the next steps are.

  This is what our conversation covered when I had lunch with Macha. We passed in the hall at school and she said, “I want to have lunch with you.”

  “Lunch?” I shouted at her down the hall. She turned around and came back.

  “I have some serious things to discuss with you and my mother always has lunch to talk things out so I think we have to have lunch.”

  “That serious, huh?” I said.

  “Oh, definitely that serious,” she said and disappeared toward the science labs.

  So Saturday we had lunch. At the Blue Star down at the Raleigh. Very Esther Williams, the Blue Star, with that pool and all. The big deal seems to be that Macha has fallen in love with Ken, the guy we met at the beach. The guy we saw at the gym. Mr. Yellow Shorts. She’s been keeping things from me and I had no idea that things were so advanced.

  I said, “Okay. So if you’re in love with him definitely you’re sleeping with him. Am I right?”

  “Almost.”

  “Macha, that makes my blood run cold to hear that someone is almost sleeping with someone else. What does that suggest to me? That you both take off all your clothes and run around the room. That you get in a backseat and dry-hump. You know how I hate the idea of dry-humping. Or you take off all your clothes and he doesn’t. And he fondles you. Or he takes off all his clothes and you fondle him. Read hand job. Really, Macha, what’s going on here? I want to know.”

  “Well,” she said, in that long-drawn-out way that makes me want to kill her, “I have seen him with all his clothes off. And he has seen me with my clothes off.”

  “At the same time?” I wanted to know.

  “No,” she said, with a kind of admiring look that meant, “You do ask the right questions, don’t you?”

  “You don’t have to give me the details,” I said. “So, what’s the problem?”

  “I just kind of consider you the expert. You’re having this all-out affair. You’re very much in love. I assume Glenn Elliott is very much in love with you. And I’m not sure of what I’m doing or what’s goin
g to happen next.” What a laugh. As if I had any idea about what was going to happen next in my life.

  “I’d say I’m becoming more of sex expert than a love expert,” I told her. “But shoot. Spill the beans and we’ll see what we can piece together here.”

  “Okay. You remember we met Ken on the beach. And I happened to see him going into the Fountainbleu health club one afternoon, so I figured hanging around there I’d probably see him. And see if he got interested. I think it was just because I was jealous of you. You had this very handsome guy on your case and I wasn’t seeing as much of you. So what was I supposed to do? Find someone similar. And Ken dropped into view. You’ve got to admit Ken is handsome. And has a great body. And the usual drill. We went out for coffee after gym. We went to the movies. Obviously I can’t go out with someone from school. They’re like kindergartners. And Ken is twenty-two. That’s only five years older than me.”

  “And then. And then?”

  “Well, it’s really strange. You know I’m not a virgin. Even if I am almost. I went to bed with Freddy Fischer a couple of times to see what all the hue and cry is about. It was definitely not about Freddy Fischer. But I think a lot of it has to do with how interested you are in the person. Ken is really weird underneath that kind of nice guy-jock look of his. For instance, he doesn’t want to sleep with me. Holds me on his lap. I can move, but not much. He doesn’t want to kiss because he says it would get him too excited.”

  “This guy must be from California.”

  “Chicago. They must be similar.”

  “They’re so self-centered. They don’t want anything to happen to them. Even have emotions. Don’t you think he’s afraid of getting AIDS? Even from a high school virgin?”

  “Almost a virgin,” Macha said.

  “As good as a virgin,” I told her.

  “Maybe that’s it. But lately I told him I was tired of being the only sex object in this arrangement and he had to let me do the same things with him. And so now I do. I undress him and play with him.”

  “Literally?”

  “Oh, yes. It gets quite big and hard.”

  “You know about masturbation, I suppose,” I asked her. She gave me quite a look.

  “Please. Could anybody get past the sixth grade in Miami Beach and not know it all?” she asked. “That doesn’t seem to be it. He sort of wants to hover around the threshold of getting really excited. But that’s it. And now I don’t know if I’ve just gone so far I want to really get into it. Or if I am really in love. I think I’m in love. I’m not the slightest bit interested in anyone else. I can’t imagine going out with anyone else. I feel like we’re sort of a twosome. He’s quite intelligent. Reads a lot.”

  “Do you think he’s gay?”

  “I think he knows the score. I definitely get the impression that he’s no amateur sexually. I’m the amateur sexually and I know all this stuff isn’t brand new to him.”

  “Where is all this stuff taking place, if I may ask?”

  “He has a little flat in Coconut Grove now. He left the beach.” Macha always refers to apartments as “flats” since she made that trip to England two years ago. “And a couple of times he’s been over to the house when my folks were away on trips.”

  “What do they think of him?” I asked.

  “My mother thinks he’s gorgeous. She would. And he reads The New Yorker and they talk about whether the new one is as good as the old one. She thinks he’s fine. And my father doesn’t like him as he has never liked any guy I’ve hung out with and never will. So what’s new?”

  “And what’s his plan, Macha?”

  “This is weird, too. He wants to be an actor, but he doesn’t want to model because he thinks that no one would take a male model seriously as an actor.” “He’s right.”

  “Have you told him you’re in love with him?” I asked her.

  “Oh, Hugo. People don’t do that,” she said.

  “Yeah, they do, Macha. The next time you see Ken I think you have to tell him you love him. You’ve gone far enough with this fooling around stuff. And it’s not good for him, either. He’s going to get all that semen backed up and get an infection.”

  Macha said, “You’re kidding.”

  “No, honestly, Macha. I don’t know very much but I know that things have to move forward or they go off the track and strange things happen. Or they stop. Or you have to stop them. You’re not really suffering from all this, are you?”

  “Not emotionally,” she said. “But I will if this goes much further like this. And I don’t want to suffer. I wasn’t brought up to suffer.”

  “Oh, that I’m sure of. That I’m sure of.”

  As I rode my bike home I thought that this was relatively heavy stuff for us to be talking about. But then, maybe the kind of things you see on the old television shows about teenagers, maybe that is relatively light stuff. I mean, Romeo and Juliet and all that. Maybe we should be into heavy stuff early on. I mean, if we’re old enough to think about it we must be old enough to do it.

  The very next day Ken called me. There was a message on our machine when I got home from school that Ken, Ken Weitz, had called. Wanted to speak to me. At Macha’s suggestion. Macha is my very good friend too. And I do want her to have a full and happy life, true. But the picture I got on Ken after our lunch is that this is a guy who doesn’t know his own mind, to say the least. I could just imagine that Macha had told him that she was in love with him. He had told her she wasn’t. And she probably had told him that I told her to declare her love. I thought I’d better speak to her first, because Ken was obviously calling me to tell me to mind my own business. But Macha wasn’t at home. And I can’t resist calling Ken to see where destiny was taking us. It’s so rare when anybody wants you to do anything.

  Ken was at home. He doesn’t report in at A Fish Called Whatever until 7:00 or so. Ken wanted to meet and talk with me. Macha had said that I was an excellent person to talk to about, exploring new directions (Really!). And he wanted to talk about becoming an actor. He was actually rather charming. He said, “Macha told me that you give very good advice.” Flattering, no? So I agreed to go over to his “flat” after school the next day. He was going to pick me up and run me over to his place so I could see his videocassette.

  You know how I’m always grousing that nothing really happens in life. It’s only what you make happen. That’s not entirely true.

  But when things do happen, they come so completely out of left field. You’re never really prepared for them. It’s like you see this person approaching; you may not know them very well, but you think you’ve got the picture on them. They have a little tray and they say they’re bringing you a tomato surprise so you just assume that’s the tomato surprise on the tray, and when they put it in front of your wondering eyes, the surprise is that it isn’t a tomato at all, it’s a time bomb. And before you can decide what you’re going to do with it, it goes off.

  Thus, Mr. Tomato Surprise Ken. My theory was that he was hustling Macha in order to make contacts. Worst possible scenario, he was going to try hustling me for the same. Like who do I know? Even though sexual intercourse is no substitute for a formal introduction, it’s worth a try. So, I’m braced. Mr. Ken looks very cute. He’s wearing white shorts. Short shorts. A white sweater. Very tan. And his legs are his feature. He’s very pleasant. He has a kind of empty apartment but nicely done. The guy has some taste. This isn’t a flophouse. He gets me a Coke. Do you get the picture on this fellow? A younger Robert Redford type, who gives the impression he might like to fuck. Which Redford certainly doesn’t.

  He said he had a video he wanted to show me to get my opinion.

  He puts a cassette into his machine and I immediately see that this is no actor’s showreel. There’s a kind of dumb title, Sailor, You Suck, or something like that, and I see three sailors coming down a street and going into what looks like a fifteenth-rate hotel.

  I’m cool. “This doesn’t look like your showreel, Ken.” One of the sai
lors was Glenn Elliott. This film isn’t new. It looks like sometime in the seventies, I’d say, and Glenn Elliott looks really young. But it’s definitely him.

  “No, but I thought you ought to see it,” says Mr. Ken. I look at him. He looks at me, face empty. Very cool. I am very cool. Even cuu-uul. “Gee,” I said, “are you trying to turn me on or something?” By this time the sailors were down to their underpants and they weren’t navy underpants. Sailors don’t wear jockeys. That much I know.

  “No, I just thought you ought to see what kind of guy your mother and you are hanging out with.” Now on the film they’re opening beers and there is a close-up of a bottle going into a guy’s mouth. I wonder if Madonna has seen this film. There’s a lot of clinking of bottles on glasses and some roughhouse so all three of them fall on the bed. Striped bedspread. This is all sort of pre-Bruce Weber but of that ilk. Terrible lighting.

  “I don’t get it, Ken,” I told him. “Why would you care? And where did you get this movie? They don’t have stuff this old in the stores.” I didn’t ask him to turn it off, you’ll notice. Now the sailors were tussling, pulling each other’s briefs off. Glenn was a lot better looking than the other two.

  “Well, I care about Macha and you’re such a good friend. I don’t like you running with a porn star,” Ken said.

  “Has she seen this stuff?” I asked him.

  “I don’t want her to see this kind of film. She’s too nice,” he said.

  “I’m not, I suppose?” He is absolutely right, of course. I’m not, but how does he know that? And then, bingo. I got it. You know how sometimes the story is right there and you don’t even have to figure it out. It’s there.

  “Glenn’s an old lover of yours, isn’t he, Ken?” Sometimes I surprise myself. I am only sixteen. And I wouldn’t say I was this calm, but I wasn’t running out the door screaming, either. But this had to be it. Straight guys don’t wear those kinds of shorts. Ken didn’t look quite so cool but he was holding it together. “What if he is, that doesn’t change anything, does it?” he said.