You’ll Never Blue Ball in This Town Again

by Heather McDonald

  On Monday, Phil called me at work and we talked for a while. I didn’t even care that my bitter boss was eavesdropping. I figured if I had to hear her haggle with every Saturn dealership from Santa Ana to Albany, New York, about the cost difference of a car with a sunroof verses one without, then she could listen to me flirt. She had scolded me another time when I went out on a two-hour lunch date with a lawyer who worked downtown. We went to McCormick’s and Schmidt’s and I knew the lunch was running long, but I wasn’t about to give up a three-course meal of shrimp cocktail, Caesar salad, and chicken piccata just because I’d have to face her sour puss.

  I realized the only way not to get shit was to make every time I left the office a medical emergency. I started carrying cotton balls and bandages in my purse so that when I returned from an hour and a half lunch where I enjoyed a steak with a stockbroker, I would come back with my arm stretched out with a cotton ball being held by a Band-Aid on the inside of the elbow and a drawn look upon my face. I’d say, “Sorry I had to go to the lab again!” Then when another luncheon date popped up, suddenly I had to take more tests. Coworkers rarely give you grief when leukemia is involved. I was strictly going on those dates for protein, but with Phil I was really interested. Phil asked me out for that Friday and of course I said yes.

  On our first couple of dates, we went out to dinner and he paid. I could tell he was a little cheap, so I never ordered a first course, just a main course. I didn’t want to rock the boat because I enjoyed being with him. Phil was tall and athletic with a perfectly tan torso, white teeth, dark hair, and he was really fun to talk to. For the third date, he asked if I wanted to come over to his apartment and hang out after work. When I asked what time, he said, “Well, how about eight-thirty?” Making it that late made it clear to me that none of the four main food groups would be offered. I was a little bummed that a meal wasn’t included, because I love to eat and have someone else pay for it, but I would do anything to just kiss Phil on his couch and snuggle into his lean neck that smelled of wild coconut. Phil had a nice rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica and kept it extremely clean. He was anal retentive, to say the least. When he wasn’t straightening his tools in his tool chest, he was applying heavy lotions to his moneymaker hands and trimming his cuticles for a potential shoot.

  I liked his place and the fact that he had no pets. I hated pretending to love a guy’s dog, especially when its wet nose was practically in my clitoris. I didn’t know if I should feel flattered or violated. The only thing I experienced that was worse than leaving a guy’s house in a little black dress covered in white dog hair was when I dated a guy who owned an overly vocal bird. It didn’t matter that he lived in a Malibu beach house. How could I enjoy the waves crashing and relax when every five seconds the bird was squawking, “Will you kiss me? Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you cunt”? My nerves were shot after the first thirty minutes. I thought about taking the bird down the street and letting it fly away and then rigging the cage to look like the bird opened it himself, but I was afraid this bird would return to testify against me and say, “Skinny legs try to kill me. … Skinny legs try to kill me.” I thought about it and realized the innocent bird had to hear the vulgarity somewhere. He didn’t just come up with it on his own. Who knows what came out of this guy’s mouth when he got angry or when his date didn’t put out, which I wouldn’t be doing, so in the end Tweety’s insults were a warning to get the hell out. Which I did.

  Phil asked if I wanted to spend the night and I immediately said, “Yes, but just so you know, I’m not going to have sex with you.”

  He sweetly said, “That’s fine.”

  Sleeping over at a guy’s house was nothing new to me. Some would say it is the ultimate act of blue balling, but I always told the guy up front that I was not going to have sex with him. I learned my lesson my freshman year of college when I went out to Gladstone’s in Santa Monica with a guy who lived off campus. He was so drunk I agreed to sleep in his bed, since he couldn’t drive me home. He was such an asshole about me not having sex with him, bringing up the fact that he had spent $46 on my piña colada and clam chowder in a sourdough bowl, that I decided to call USC security at three a.m. to come and pick me up and drive me back to my dorm. I told them I was a nurse in training and had to make five a.m. rounds that morning in the trauma unit. Since then, I always made it clear, not that I had never had sex before, but that I wasn’t going to have sex on that night. Sleeping at Phil’s was fine except that I was so afraid I would snore or drool. I barely closed my eyes all night.

  Slowly the dates between Phil and me started to get progressively worse. They no longer included a meal or even a healthy snack such as a Balance Bar. We weren’t even seeing each other on the weekends anymore. I had become Miss Monday. We did, however, make plans for him to come to my apartment on a Sunday at five p.m. I was going to make us salmon in dill sauce, rice, and salad for dinner. All of my roommates were out of town. He was going to come by after he was done surfing. Knowing how neat he was and how disgusting our apartment was—with no money for a cleaning service or picking up a Consuelo outside of Home Depot to come and clean—I must have spent six hours scouring every crevice of our place, from the eye shadow embedded in the bathroom tile grout to the never-before-dusted balcony. That didn’t even include the amount of time I spent shopping and cooking. Just as I was finishing putting tea roses in a vase—as if we lived like that—the phone rang and it was Phil saying he was still surfing. I acted really casual like I was the cool girlfriend and said, “That’s fine. Have fun! I’ll see you in an hour or so.” I continued polishing, dusting, and rearranging the throw pillows on the twin bed in the living room we used as a couch when the phone rang again and Phil said he was now stuck in a lot of traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway. Again I assured him it was fine and I’d see him when he got there.

  Then he called about twenty minutes later and said, “You know, I’m really tired. Can we do this another time?”

  “What? Are you kidding me? No! This is so rude of you. I’ve been waiting here all day for you,” I said extremely annoyed.

  “OK. I’m coming,” he said like the guilty flake he was.

  No sooner could I regain my happiness than the phone rang again and it was Phil. “You know what, I’m not coming tonight. I don’t think this is working out.”

  I tried to backpedal and soon ended up begging for him to allow me to come over to his place and talk. I knew I had to tell him that I was a virgin. I knew he was confused, thinking how could this girl who was willing to grind me up against a dirty wall in the middle of the afternoon only hours after meeting still not be having sex with me after numerous dates and sleepovers? At the time, I figured if I could just be honest with him, he’d understand and we could continue to date until we became exclusive and then we’d have sex.

  When I got to Phil’s place, we sat on the couch together and I finally said it. “Phil, the reason I have not had sex with you is because I’ve never had it with anyone. I’m a virgin.”

  He was very surprised and said, “Wow, I was wondering, Why doesn’t this girl have any interest in my penis?” Of course, I’m sure no girl has ever turned down having sex with his penis as many times as I did, especially with those hands of his, which were practically insurable. So I thought by telling him, he would get that I was not rejecting him. I went on to say, “I just want to assure you I’m not saving it for marriage. I just want to be in a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship.” I even dropped the “love” part so as to not freak him out, but it was too late. He was freaked.

  He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Look, Heather, I think you’re a great girl, but I don’t want this responsibility.”

  What responsibility? I’m not asking you to marry me or raise a child with me. But it was out there now, that in order for him to have sex with me like normal people do in their twenties and thirties, he’d have to promise to be my boyfriend. I’m sure he feared that once we did have sex, I’d be impossibl
e to break up with. I left that night devastated and cursing my virginity. Why didn’t I just get it over with and sleep with Kevin or any of the other dozen guys in college who skateboarded past me. But then I’d go back in my mind and say no, I want it to be special with someone who really cared about me, and obviously Phil didn’t. He didn’t even want to come over and have dinner with me at my place on a Sunday night when I had prepared wild salmon from the Copper River.

  The following weekend after the breakup, I had no plans, which depressed me. As I was lying by the pool on Saturday reading People magazine, this guy in our building, Clay, started talking to me. We had seen each other a few times, and he and his friend offered me a margarita. Clay and his roommate, Todd, had made a pitcher and brought it down to the pool. Clay was not my type. He was kind of short, had long hair, and was not a college graduate. But as the cheap tequila set in, my mood improved. Then Clay and Todd invited me to a party that they were going to that night in Chatsworth, about a half hour away from the apartment.

  “Totally,” I said. “Let me just go up and change.” As I was putting on my black shorts and fitted black vest, my roommates questioned my sanity.

  “Those guys are gross,” Tara said.

  “Who cares? I have nothing else to do tonight and I want to have fun. Maybe there’ll be someone good at the party.” I did not want to go back to the cubicle on Monday having done nothing fun all weekend.

  The party seemed pretty average to the naked eye. It was a ranch-style family home in the Valley. Most of the people there were older—mid- to late thirties, some forties—and within minutes I knew there were no potential dudes for me. My buzz wore off and I wondered how I was going to hang there all night because Todd had driven the three of us. That’s when Clay told me he had brought something for us. He opened a little brown bag and it was mushrooms. I had never tried cocaine, though I’d been offered it many times. I never tried it because I knew it had a reputation for giving you the energy to talk all night and make you not want to eat. Anything that could curb my appetite and inspire me to talk more, most likely about myself, was just too tempting. With that combination, if I even tried it once, I knew I’d become addicted. I tried pot once, but everybody kept yelling at me that I was smoking the bong wrong. I decided it was too technical and no drug is worth having to be criticized. So when I was offered a drug that just required eating it, I felt confident I could do it successfully. Besides, I loved all kinds of mushrooms: white mushrooms, portobello, oysters, shiitake. Why not psychedelic mushrooms, too?

  The next thing I knew, I was swimming in the pool and it was not a pool party. I was diving off the diving board fully clothed doing back flips and cannon balls. The only other person who joined me was Clay. I loved swimming in that pool. I did it for hours. I had been on the swim team in elementary school, so I knew all the strokes. I did the breast stroke, the butterfly, and in between was kissing Clay by the waterfall. I was so high that I never noticed that everyone at the party but us was in the porn industry, but I, the virgin, was the crazy one. It made sense: Chatsworth is the porn capital of the world. Even if I hadn’t taken the mushrooms, it’s not like I knew who these porn stars or directors were. The only porn I’d seen at that point was one starring my sister’s childhood friend. We were so curious we had to pop it in the VCR. She was having a three-way with two other girls. Thinking back, probably in that house’s living room with the same rock fireplace. I felt bad for our old childhood friend, rubbing and licking and working so hard to get these two other girls off and it was never her turn. I hope she got paid a little extra for that, but fortunately I don’t know how the porn union works.

  Todd drove us home, and I’m sure he was drunk, but we made it back to Brentwood alive and soaking wet. I don’t know what I had said to Clay all night, but he definitely thought he was going to get lucky. I told him to change into dry clothes and I’d do the same, and meet me back at my apartment. The minute I got in my apartment, I locked the door behind me. For at least an hour, Clay called my phone and then ran up and pounded on my door for five minutes. Then he’d go back down and start calling all while I pretended to pass out. The next eight months, I avoided running into him as best I could. I also avoided ordering anything with mushrooms for fear of ending up fully clothed in the deep end of a pool somewhere.

  The following Friday, I got a call from the human resources girl at Robinsons May. She said, “Hey, Heather, can you come by and talk? I’m busy now, but how about five p.m.?” “Sure,” I said. I didn’t think much of it until I saw her coming down the escalator and smiled at her, but when she saw me, she averted her eyes and immediately pretended like she didn’t see me. It was just like Penny Baker did when she knew I hadn’t made varsity cheerleading. At five o’clock, I went to her office and she said, “Heather, today is the kind of day I hate, because it’s going to be your last.” She went on to say that Robinsons May and I just weren’t a good fit. I think the fact that I hadn’t mastered the computer program after ten months on the job didn’t help. I burst into tears. What was I going to tell my parents? They had such dreams of me becoming a manager of the Woodland Hills Robinsons May one day. Within twenty minutes, I was in my car pulling off my smelly, disgusting nylons for the last time, and I felt this overwhelming sense of relief. This was the last time I would ever have to drive on this parking lot. Free at last! Free at last! Lord have mercy—Heather McDonald is free at last!

  Now what the hell was I going to do?

  I finally decided to do what I always feared: be a waitress while I pursued acting. I had reason to fear it. I can say with confidence that I was the world’s worst waitress. To get the job waiting tables I had lied, saying that I had waitressed throughout college. At the restaurant where I worked we’d put the orders in the computers and “runners” would bring the food out for us. Once we were short a runner and I was asked to bring three plates out, which I had no idea how to do, let alone the strength in my weak wrists to balance three large entrees. I quickly thought up another lie and said, “Well, at my last restaurant we had a very strict insurance policy and it was illegal to carry more than two plates at a time.” But nothing was more horrifying then the day I took a lunch order at a table that also included lamb chops to go. When I placed the check down the woman looked at me and nicely asked, “Oh, and can you bring our lamb chops to go now, please?” My face turned white. I never had entered the lamb chop order into the computer! I had completely forgotten. The lamb chops took a good twenty minutes to prepare. There was no way to fix this. I went back to the kitchen and started to hyperventilate, while clutching my vagina in fear. I looked back at table 19 sucking on their after-dinner mints and tallying up their bill. These people were actually leaving me a tip. They had no idea. I didn’t deserve to live. What if the chops were for their boss? I had ruined two innocent people’s livelihoods. If it wasn’t for my manager, who talked me down and gave them a complimentary veal marsala to take back with them, I might have ended my life right there.

  I had already taken a little stand-up course, so I had a ten-minute act that I could perform at open mikes and small rooms, which I did. That’s where I met Dan.

  Dan was a thirty-four-year-old divorced dad with a five-year-old son. He was a successful commercial real estate broker whose real passion was stand-up comedy. He had a deal with a restaurant with a back room where they had comedy night once a week. He’d book the comics, which also ensured him a spot to perform. Dan was not my type, especially after supermodel Phil. He was tall and thin, had curly brown hair, and wore glasses. But I thought that maybe I shouldn’t go for looks again and instead go for someone who gets me. In turn, Dan thought I was funny, and at this early stage in my comedy career, this was extremely important to me.

  I was driving Dan back to his house after we had both performed at a coffee shop when he happened to spot those disgusting suntan nylons in my car. He assumed they came off when I was in the heat of passion with someone. I pulled them out of his hands
for fear of any lingering sweaty feet smell and explained about my horrible cubicle job and my recent uninvited departure. He started looking around and asked, “What else do you keep in this car?” Then the real horror set in and Dan said, “Heather, why do you have a boneless uncooked chicken breast in your car? It’s going to go bad. What kind of Saran Wrap is this wrapped in? Wait, what is this?”

  I turned to see Dan—my new crush—holding one of my silicone breast enhancers in his hand. I had peeled off my breasts after a long sweaty night of dancing at a nightclub the previous week and I had totally forgotten about them. In fact, I had been gossiping with my roommates about how I thought Tara had stolen them when all the while they were under my passenger seat. I tried to grab it, but when he realized what it was, he started to hold it up high and tease me. “Heather, I have your boob. Don’t you think it’s a little early for us to be going to second base?” I was driving and he was holding it up high, and somehow it fell out of my sunroof and landed on the front window of my Celica. We were now going pretty fast on Santa Monica Boulevard, and the combination of the speed and the adhesive on the tittie cutlet made it clear that this boob was not leaving. I tried to turn on my windshield wipers, but they weren’t strong enough to move it. I explained to Dan, “I wasn’t pretending I had bigger boobs. I wasn’t wearing a bra and didn’t want nipple hard-on.” As I turned the spray mist on it, the windshield wiper was finally able to push the boob cutlet off all the way into the vehicle driving beside us. The older woman whose lap it landed on looked horrified at the wayward jellyfish as I quickly made a right turn and kissed my one breast goodbye forever.