Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat

by Victoria Fedden

  “I know it was you. Next thing I’ll come in here and you’ll have everybody sitting on the floor playing Duck Duck Goose. Naked!”

  “That’s an idea,” I said, “And, um, what’s that in your hand? It looks pink to me.”

  “I was thirsty! Don’t tell anybody.”

  “I won’t,” I laughed.

  “My stepdad only let me have these on my birthday and then he’d call me a pussy.”

  “You’re not a pussy Brent,” I wanted to hug him but I just stood there until he finished his drink and walked away.

  Brent had good news at the end of the night. Before we cashed out he called a quick meeting of staff and dancers alike.

  “Angel is in the ICU at Broward General,” he told us, “She OD’d from mixing pills and alcohol, which you should NEVER EVER do. We don’t know what she took or where she got it, but she’s going to pull through. So it’s good news. Angel is going to be ok but we don’t know when she’s coming back or if she’s coming back.”

  You could actually hear everyone’s sighs of relief.

  “This calls for a toast!” one of the bartenders announced.

  Pink and fizzy, with extra cherries for everyone. We raised our plastic cups high above our heads.

  19

  I got an early birthday present when the lawsuits settled the first week of November. I didn’t even have to go to Atlanta. I’d been dreading a call from my lawyer, who wore polyester slacks and worked out of his apartment, saying I had to fly up for a hearing, but I guess that’s why they call it “power of attorney.” He went and I got to stay in Florida and thank God because I didn’t want to take off work and pay a fortune for a plane ticket. Earlier that summer I’d gone up to Atlanta twice for preliminary hearings. The second time, I picked up my car in the parking lot of the airport (Evan had left it there so I wouldn’t come to the house) and drove it ten hours back to Fort Lauderdale, at least eight hours of which I sobbed.

  I don’t understand legal matters. My brain has a block on all things legalese. The shit is like calculus to me. It’s overwhelming, scary and makes no sense, so I’ll make it short. I won but I lost. But I won. According to my lawyer, the judge didn’t think there was a case. He sent an appraiser to the house to assess its value and when the appraiser came back the judge said that Evan had to be out within a week unless he could pay me the full appraised value of the home. If he moved out, the house was mine to rent or sell or move back into, but the thing is, Evan would never let that happen because he knew that’s what I wanted. Don’t ask me how, but Evan came up with that money. My lawyer organized a quick closing and Evan bought my house. I paid off the mortgage and it was over.

  And then the motherfucker called me demanding my engagement ring.

  “I will never, ever give you that ring,” I said.

  “It’s my ring, you fucking bitch, and Keisha deserves it.”

  He tried to bribe me. I’d had to leave all of my old photo albums, the few pictures I’d pieced together from my childhood, in the attic of the old house because I’d left so hastily. If I gave back the ring he’d send the albums, but I refused and he shouted through the phone that he’d burn them, that he’d destroy everything that was mine and everything that I’d left behind that meant something to me. I hung up the phone.

  Everyone should have a jeweler in the family. My dad’s uncle, an old orthodox Jew from Slovakia, deals in diamonds and on my day off I took a drive to the Sebold building in Miami and sold him my one carat, round solitaire. Evan had given it to me in Key West, at midnight at the Southernmost Point. Ninety miles from Cuba, he’d gotten down on one knee and instead of asking me to marry him, he’d said instead that he had something he knew I really wanted. I should have known something was wrong. All I could smell was the sulfur, salty stink of the ocean.

  “Uncle, I want a new diamond,” I said, “Can you find me a heart and put it on a chain? Something plain, white gold.”

  A week later my uncle drove up to my parents’ house. He had the necklace in a plastic bag and it was exactly as I’d pictured. I fastened it around my neck. Like the Tin Man, I had a heart again. My old one had been shattered beyond repair but my new one, though tiny, was made from the hardest substance on earth. Absolutely unbreakable.

  20

  I’d never really dated. I’d met Evan when I was just nineteen and immediately it was like we were together. There was no dating. We had some chicken fingers at TGI Fridays and we were a couple and that was that, so I didn’t even know what dating was. I’d had that quick lunch with Brent, but other than that, nothing, because you sure as hell can’t count Adam. The only place I ever went with him was to bed.

  I wanted a boyfriend. I had to meet someone because Evan had someone and I didn’t and it wasn’t fair. I celebrated my twenty-seventh birthday at home with my parents feeling sorry for myself because I was alone. Brent, who at first seemed my only remote prospect, wasn’t interested. At first I’d thought he flirted and sometimes it seemed like he might be into me, but someone said he was dating Aurora, a petite Cambodian stripper who looked like one of the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp. I didn’t believe it and thought maybe I had a chance with him until I saw his arm around her. So much for the good Southern Baptist, right? Boy was I ever wrong about him.

  My mom thought I was too naive and that I needed to practice dating. I was terrified. I couldn’t bear the idea of all that rejection again. I wanted an instant perfect boyfriend, a Sanka man that I could just pour some water on, stir and he would appear all ready, committed and ideal. I didn’t want to put in the effort of dating, then waiting. I also wasn’t in the position to meet anyone in my line of work. The guys that went to strip clubs weren’t my type. They were mostly weirdos and Guidos and men who had things terribly wrong with them. The guys who loved Radiohead and acted like characters in a Cameron Crowe movie weren’t hanging at the Kittikat.

  “Go on JDate,” my mother suggested.

  She knew someone who knew someone, whose daughter’s friend’s cousin had met her husband on the online Jewish dating site. The way my mother described it, JDate was like a catalog of ideal Jewish men all ready to marry me. She persisted. I resisted.

  “Don’t bitch about not having a boyfriend if you’re not willing to do what it takes to get yourself out there and get one,” my mother said.

  “Well for your information, I have a date tonight,” I said, “So you see, I don’t need the Internet to find me a man. I got asked out while making color copies.”

  A couple days earlier I had been at Kinko’s making color copies of some Hindu prints that I had gotten the brilliant idea to decoupage onto some chunks of particle board I found lying around my parents’ garage. Hey, I was bored when I wasn’t at work. I felt artsy-craftsy. I was standing in a long line and there was a guy in front of me who looked to be about my age or slightly older talking on his phone. I noticed he had a peculiar Mid-Atlantic accent, just like my mom’s family up in Delaware. You can’t mistake it. They swallow their vowels and everything sounds nasal. Th sounds like D. The word “going” is one syllable – “goyn.” It’s awful, but it’s a conversation starter, so when the guy got off the phone I asked him if he was from Delaware.

  “Oh my God, yes!” he said, “How did you know?”

  “You’ll never believe it, but I was born in Milford. I still have tons of family up there. I recognized the accent.”

  “You don’t sound like you’re from Milford,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s because I’ve spent years trying not to sound like I was from Milford!”

  He laughed and we got to talking about how we both ended up in South Florida, because usually people from rural Delaware don’t ever leave. To make things all the more outrageous, he also claimed to be Jewish.

  “There are no Jews in Delaware,” I said, “What are you talking about?”

  He said that was why his family had moved and now they all lived in the Jewish paradise that is South Florida where
there are bagels in every grocery store and real delis almost like in New York.

  All through the line at Kinko’s this guy and I talked although he was clearly on the dork side and not someone I could see myself dating. He was one of those guys who wears tee shirts, usually from some event like a work conference or his family reunion at Killens Pond. The tee shirt is then tucked into high waisted jeans which may or may not be acid-washed, but usually are. There is a belt of some sort. In this case it was a skinny belt and braided. White lace up sneakers finish the look and these are worn with athletic knee socks but you can’t see those because they are under the jeans. It is safe to bet that also under the jeans are a nice pair of tightie-whities.

  I knew that this guy was going to ask me out before he even said his name, which was Evan by the way, but I tried not to hold that against him. You know how sometimes you can just tell when someone is going to hit on you and you can’t get away but you really want to make those copies because you’re excited about your decoupage project so you don’t want to pretend to have an asthma attack and go running for your car?

  I had finally just realized that I was not as desirable to men as I had previously imagined myself to be. When I first moved to Florida, I didn’t realize my competition down here would be girls with a 16 BMI, melon-like implants and waist length sheets of platinum hair. I thought men didn’t like trashy girls like that and they’d like me because I was completely presentable. Your mother would love me as long as she didn’t know where I worked. I could be classy enough when the situation required it and I looked like Audrey Hepburn’s chunky American cousin after all. By rural Delaware standards I was hot as sizzling hell, but there my competition consisted of girls who’d had three kids by the time they were twenty and lived on nothing but green bean casseroles and Cheeseburger Macaroni Hamburger Helper. By South Florida standards I was plain and teacherish, mousy even, with crooked teeth. My options were limited and guys down here didn’t want someone to take to Sunday dinners at their parents’ house. They wanted glamor goddesses, Hawaiian Tropic swimsuit models. I tried to accept this and decided I’d learn to acquire a taste for guys who were more in my league. I figured I was being too picky and that I was shallow and that I should learn to give guys a chance who were less than doctors and lawyers with movie-star good looks, because those guys didn’t like girls like me anyway. That’s why I said yes to the guy in line at Kinko’s. I was being humble and generous and trying to prevent an awkward situation. I could have given him a fake number I suppose, but someone had done that to me once and it was crushing. Perhaps, I thought, he was a nice guy and what do clothes matter? If things worked out I could go shopping with him and give him a makeover.

  The weather was a disaster that night. He picked me up in torrential rains and promptly gave me a super-sized bag of jumbo Reese’s cups. Everyone knows that if you want to get on my good side that peanut butter and chocolate is a good tool towards that goal. I was impressed.

  We went for pizza. I like pizza. I didn’t require Michelin starred fine dining. Pizza is fine. We ordered a large pepperoni and made small talk, the usual stuff about how many siblings we had, where we went to school and all that, but then it started to get ugly. He was a recent divorcee and his wife, whom he claimed was out of her mind, was an anorexic who weighed 80 pounds and had an addiction to prescription drugs. After a suicide attempt, she was institutionalized and then from the mental hospital she filed for divorce from him. That’s pretty bad. He was heartbroken, possibly worse than me, but something else was definitely off with this guy. He now lived with his parents and his brother and he couldn’t stand any of them and they fought all the time and as soon as he started getting paid from his telemarketing job he was going to start thinking about moving out. I was finishing up my pizza and figuring out how I could make my escape and end the date early, when the conversation took a turn for the worse.

  “I need to tell you something,” he said, “In case we get serious I want you to know this about me now.”

  There was already no chance of us getting serious but I prepared myself for the following possibilities anyway: herpes, a child, a prosthetic leg, a terminal illness or a complicated learning disability. Maybe he was a fugitive, although that would be good news because I could call America’s Most Wanted and get a reward.

  He looked down at his plastic plate and knit his eyebrows. He rubbed his nose, cleared his throat and looked at the pizza for a very long time. He cleared his throat again as I waited for his revelation.

  Finally he came out with it.

  “I have a four inch penis.”

  He couldn’t look me in the eye. He seemed to tremble as he stared at his pizza crust.

  I didn’t exactly know what to do. Normally my brain doesn’t function properly in situations like this and I’ll say something stupid like: “OH MY GOD THAT’S TINY!”

  Miraculously, I didn’t blurt out anything inappropriate. My brain was functioning that evening, for once, and I realized that for some reason this guy had a major complex and that my reaction could potentially make this poor soul’s life even worse than it already was. So I said:

  “Oh that’s average size isn’t it? Every penis I’ve ever seen has been about three or four inches. Totally normal.” And after all, wasn’t the most recent penis I’d encountered only the size of a salt shaker anyway? It wasn’t a total lie.

  Evan from Kinko’s just about sprinted to the jewelry store to get me an engagement ring, so perhaps that answer was a mistake after all. I, on the other hand, couldn’t get home and away fast enough and not because he had a four inch penis but because he told me on a first date that he had a four inch penis and this is just not acceptable behavior. You should not discuss your weiner on a first date. Save that conversation for the second date, please. Jeez.

  At the end of the date I decided that I had to be honest and not string this guy along.

  “I’m sorry, Evan, I don’t think there’s a spark between us,” I said and he began to weep, right there into his root beer.

  “It’s because of my penis isn’t it? I know it is.”

  I picked up a pile of napkins because his nose was running in the most unbecoming way, but then I realized I’d used them to dab the top of my pizza and they were all orange and oily. Before I could snatch them away, he grabbed them and wiped pepperoni grease all over his face.

  He was right. It kind of was because of his penis, just not in the way he thought.

  I picked up the bill because I felt sorry for him and he drove me home. It took me over an hour in his car in my driveway to comfort him because I couldn’t just let some sobbing sap with a four inch penis cry on the front yard in the middle of a downpour. We had some Reese’s cups and when I thought he wouldn’t run the car off a bridge in despair, I sent him home.

  The funniest thing is that when he left it occurred to me that I had no idea how big or how small four inches even was. He acted like it was problematically small so I studied the tiles in my bathroom, having remembered that they were, indeed, four inch tiles. I got the ruler out to be sure and what I found was that four inches wasn’t all that alarming really. One could probably work with four inches. Two would be an issue. Poor Adam had about three, I’d wager, and it certainly hadn’t stopped him. I could see somebody weeping over a two inch ding dong for an hour, but four wasn’t so bad. Maybe I’m generous. I’ve also been known to have dreadful spatial reasoning skills, so who knows. In any case, Evan from Kinko’s and I didn’t see each other again.

  21

  I was batting zero here. Brent turned out to like Asian strippers who danced in shiny, black pleather. Unendowed Adam demanded I praise his huge cock, while Evan from Kinko’s cried over slightly under average.

  “Fine,” I said when Evan finally drove away and I could come inside, “Fine. I’ll look at the J-date website but that is it. I’m just looking.”

  I decided to browse through the profiles online and see if there was anyone cute or inte
resting. As I expected, there were a lot of dorky guys with big honkers and male pattern baldness who said their salaries were a hundred K plus per year. Many of them were shorter than me. At least 97% of them said they liked red wine and walks on the beach at sunset. They were all looking for women who were in shape, spontaneous and who liked travel.

  “Just make yourself a profile for fun. See what happens,” my mother nagged.

  I did it to shut her up. I was out to prove her wrong. I was not going to meet anyone on stupid JDate and I had no interest in drinking red wine and walking on the god damned beach at sunset with a guy with male-pattern baldness, who was five four and made six figures.

  I made my profile as strange as I could. Making the profile strange also made it honest. I admitted that I hate sushi, even though I knew it was very gauche of me. The gelatinous, sinewy feel of raw fish on my tongue makes me retch and I said so. I included that my perfect man should be able to fix things around the house and cook at least a few simple dishes. I said that I liked Wilco and Belle and Sebastian and that bad taste in music was a deal breaker. I stated fully that I was completely OCD, that I liked cats, and that I wanted nothing to do with players who used too much hair gel. Lloyd Dobler, your Diane Cort is now waiting at the window for you to raise your boom box. I figured all these things would deter most of the beach walkers. Last I added a photo. My friend Rachel had taken it only a week before Evan and I had broken up. Rachel and I had been on vacation in St. Michael’s Maryland. She’d raced to the top of the lighthouse with her camera and photographed me in black and white from above. In the picture, I’m smiling up at her and wearing a straw sunhat looking happy, not having a single clue about how my life would change in just a few days.