“No?” he asked, “I’d be your first? I’ll give you three hundred then. I’ll pay for a virgin.”
“Look, I have to go,” I said.
“Let me buy you champagne,” he called as I disappeared into the crowd.
An hour later he sent a bottle of Veuve to the front desk. When I got back Sunny went on break. If she noticed my transformation she said nothing about it and the champagne arrived, sweating in its bucket of ice, right when she came back from dinner.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Some smarmy dude wants me to show him my boobs for three hundred dollars. Now he’s sending gifts to make me change my mind,” I said.
“Cool.”
I poured her a glass of bubbly. Champagne wasn’t my thing and I figured it shouldn’t go to waste, but then I changed my mind and filled a flute for myself too even though I knew it meant mandatory heartburn.
“Look! Adam and Rick are here just in time for the contest!” Sunny exclaimed jumping up and down.
Act cool, I told myself. Nonchalant. Like I don’t care. Icy. Aloof. Unattainable. I looked in the other direction like his presence meant nothing but his “Hey Baby” to Sunny grated on my last nerve. They hugged and I turned around to give him my most casual smirk. God was he so not cute. Without even making eye contact he gave me a lazy half wave.
“‘Sup?” he said and turned back to Sunny.
‘Sup? ’Sup? All I was good for was a lame ’Sup? He couldn’t even give me a Hey? Couldn’t even ask how I was doing? Not even a “good to see you?” Maybe expecting a compliment, a “Wow, you look amazing!” was too much to ask, but I deserved a simple friendly salutation, something more than a grunted syllable. I’d told the guy I liked his cock for God’s sakes. I’d baked him chocolate chip banana bread!
When I get mad I cry. I really hate this about myself because it always happens when I want to look extra badass and tough, but every time someone pisses me off and they deserve a good cussing, all I can do is stand there and snot and sniffle with tears messing up my makeup. It’s pitiful and I couldn’t stop it from happening. My throat closed and the tears flooded my vision, blurring the club’s colored lights. I tried to hold them back, to keep the salt water from washing away my newly painted face like rain on sidewalk chalk.
There I was, trembling in the darkest corner of the front desk area with my head down and the bobby pins already working their way out of my big, crunchy hair-do. Pathetic as usual. I tried to take a sip of the champagne in my hand, but its acidic fizz just about gagged me and all I could do was watch Adam make googly eyes at Sunny. And then it was like some internal switch got flipped and I realized that I didn’t want to be in the corner anymore. I wasn’t going to just stand there and let him ’Sup me and wave me off like some stranger and I didn’t want to be the girl who retreats into tears for one more second.
It wasn’t like I looked at the glass of champagne in my hand and looked at Adam and decided consciously that the two needed to meet. I didn’t premeditate flinging the full glass of Veuve in his face. It just happened. One second I held the stem of the flute and the next I flipped my wrist and caught Adam by surprise with a champagne shower. I was just as shocked as Adam and Sunny.
“What the fuck? Fucking bitch!” Adam yelled.
Sunny threw up her hands and looked at me as if to say “Are you fucking nuts?” before she grabbed the roll of paper towels from under the register and tried to dry him off.
“Fucking Psycho!” he screamed pointing at me. His face turned red and he pushed Sunny away. I thought he was going to come over the counter after me.
“This is a fucking Hugo Boss shirt you crazy bitch! You’re going to pay for it! You’re going to buy me a new one you stupid, crazy bitch!”
“You know what? I don’t give a shit if I have to pay for your stupid shirt. It was worth it!” I said.
“What is the matter with you?” Sunny said, flinging her arms up again in exasperation, “Leave my friend alone!”
“He’s a piece of shit. A lying dog,” I said.
Then I turned to Adam who was now frantically trying to scrape a wad of paper towels across his collar to soak up the champagne. I pointed my finger at him.
“You played me, you scumbag. You knew what my ex did me to me and you used me. You took advantage of me. You lied to me. You used me for sex when you were bored like I wasn’t even a person.”
He didn’t even look up from trying to dry the front of his shirt.
“Pfft. I didn’t use you for sex. You sucked in bed. You were a lame lay.”
“You know what asshole?” I said, really getting loud now, “You have a small dick! A little tiny three inch penis! I couldn’t even feel it it was so small!!”
That made him look up. Adam dropped the bunch of paper towels and this time I thought he really might hit me. I must have found a weak spot because he lost his mind and started screaming and cussing and causing a huge scene, though he didn’t get very far before Paolo and Charlie, the bouncers, heard him. They each took an arm. It wasn’t hard because Adam was a pipsqueak next to them and his threats to sue them fell on deaf ears. They heard that every night and they sure as hell weren’t intimidated by his antics.
“Don’t disrespect my girl like that. Get the fuck out of here,” Big Mack told him.
Adam’s friend Rick tried to get in on the action and began threatening all sorts of legal action as well.
“She threw a glass at him!” Rick said, “It was her fault.”
He pointed at me but the bouncers were unfazed. They always sided with their own. They had my back.
“It’s true! She ruined my shirt!” Adam complained.
Charlie made like he was playing the sad violin.
“Waah wah,” Big Mack said, making fun of Adam’s childish wining, “Now both of you douchebags get the fuck out of here and don’t come back and harass my door girl again.”
Charlie laughed.
“Yeah,” he added, “I heard her say you had a small dick, man. Poor you. That must suck.”
Charlie and Big Mack pushed the two fools outside and stood with their backs against the double doors, arms crossed in front of them. Rick and Adam swore and screamed and made obscene gestures through the glass but in a few minutes they gave up and disappeared, probably leaving to go snort a bump of crushed painkillers in Adam’s SUV before finding a new place to party.
Exasperated, Sunny asked me what my problem was and why I started shit with her friend.
“Shut up,” I said.
I didn’t have the patience to try to explain it to her and if she didn’t understand then she was an idiot. She never spoke to me again. We finished out the night in silence and I don’t even remember who won the Amateur Contest that night, though I’d eked out a small personal victory. I’d managed to get Adam kicked out of the club. I’d publically ridiculed his wiener, which was immensely satisfying, more so than having sex with him ever was I must say.
More than that, because getting an idiot thrown out of a club wasn’t that great of a feat, I’d discovered a new confidence. With the help of an artist and an arsenal of cosmetics, my frumpy exterior was briefly chiseled away to reveal a hot girl, a sassy girl with a little swagger who’d been hidden away all along. She was a girl who tossed a drink in a guy’s face when he deserved it; a girl whose nudity was worth money.
I didn’t take my shirt off for three hundred bucks. I didn’t disrobe for any amount of money, at least not that night, but I’d come close. What did I want? What could that three hundred dollars get me, I’d wondered and I’d considered the fun it could purchase. A plane ticket? A new pair of boots? A weekend in Key West to get away from it all? I asked Brent but he waved me away because he’d had an awful night so far and couldn’t be bothered with my insignificant nonsense.
“Do whatever you want. At this point, I don’t give a shit and how about bringing me a Seven and Seven from the bar while you’re at it,” he’d said.
&nb
sp; I got him the drink and while at the bar I looked for the man with the ponytail.
“You wanna see my tits? Hand over the cash,” I’d planned to say, but he was long gone by that point and who knows if it came right down to it if I’d have had the guts to go through with it. Sometimes I think I would’ve done it, but other times I think I know myself better than that.
I got home at four in the morning. I crept inside, careful not to make a ruckus and set the dogs in a barking fit. My hair had sunk some by then, but it still held up pretty well. I didn’t want to wash the makeup off and I wasn’t nearly as tired as I should have been so I tip-toed back into the family room where my mother’s rows of computers whirred and stirred. My little computer at the end of the row hummed to life when I jimmied the mouse. I had almost thirty emails waiting for me on Jdate and I decided to give it another shot. Maybe dating would be different for me as a hot girl.
39
After my awkward date with Eric, the obese guy who lived with his grandmother in a retirement community, I’d gotten busy with the holidays, preoccupied with work and Rachel’s wedding and I hadn’t devoted any attention to dating. Besides that, during the entire month of December, the only guy who’d emailed me on Jdate was a Jewish Rastafarian. His parents had called him Ira, but he’d changed his name to Irie. In his profile picture he wore a red, green and gold knit beanie and a Yellowman tee shirt. Judging by the pink squint of his eyes, he’d recently communed with Jah through a six foot Graffix bong with Bob Marley stickers on it and while all of this could certainly make for an amusing story, I decided it wasn’t worth an evening of my time. Sometimes I still wonder what might have happened had I gone out with Irie. Perhaps I would have ended up in the Blue Mountains eating curried goat and running a ganga plantation, but I have a hunch that life wouldn’t exactly suit my style. I deleted poor Irie’s email, the subject line of which read “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright.”
Luckily that night, after I’d come home from the Amateur Contest, after I’d thrown a drink in Adam’s face and almost showed a stranger my bare chest for three hundred dollars, amidst an inbox crammed with canned messages from guys who’d obviously never even looked at my profile, I found the note from The Canadian. Personalized, grammatically correct and hoping to perhaps change my mind about sushi, The Canadian, whose name was Michael, inquired about getting to know me.
“Has anyone ever told you that you look like Natalie Wood?” he had written.
I clicked reply.
Michael was really handsome in real life. After Eric, I’d started taking those profile photos with quite the grain of salt, but Michael actually looked better in person than in his snapshot and he was beautifully dressed in perfectly pressed wool dress pants held up by a Hermes belt, a crisp white button down and polished Prada driving shoes. He had dark, curly hair and bright blue eyes. No amount of shaving could lighten his five ‘o’ clock shadow, but I liked the rugged masculine look. Switch his Brooks Brothers oxford for plaid flannel and you could easily picture him trapping fur in the Yukon. From Toronto, Michael spoke with this cute Canadian accent and all night on our first date (fondue!) I tried to make him say words like house and about.
We had a lovely dinner and I mean, how bad could a pot of molten cheese followed by another pot of hot fudge have been? Though he didn’t kiss me as he dropped me off, on his drive home Michael called me to make plans for a sequel to our first date. It was a major dating milestone. Someone wanted to have dinner with me a second time and I was up for it too, but then I realized I hadn’t told him that I worked in a strip club. Oddly enough my employment hadn’t even come up in conversation, though he briefly questioned that I lived with my parents. Perhaps I’d subconsciously avoided telling him though I wanted to honest and up front with him.
“Come down to South Beach. The restaurants are better here,” he said the following Friday. Sunny, who’d predictably started cocktailing on most nights, wanted the door on Friday so I gave up my shift for her as long as Brent promised me Saturdays and Amateur Nights.
Michael instructed me to dress up because he would take me somewhere more upscale than fondue. Hell yeah, I thought, because fondue was pretty freakin’ upscale in my book already. Dress up? Not a problem. One night of tips plus the closest Ann Taylor equaled a new silk sheath. One shouldered and slit nearly to the hip, the dress suited my new persona well while remaining elegant. Hot but not whore-ish became my new mantra. Because yes I could stick on the fake eyelashes and tease my roots a little but I had to draw the line at hot pants and sequined halters. There is only so far into Slutville that I was willing to travel and no matter what, I’d always swoon over the Audrey Hepburn look. Michael liked it too. He complimented my taste in clothes immediately.
Each week for nearly a month, Michael would call me, make plans and tell me to dress up. I’d run to the mall for a new outfit, drive to his North Miami loft, get in his white BMW and we’d weave through the weekend South Beach traffic, valet park and linger over dinners in fancy restaurants where Michael attempted to entice me into eating things like bone marrow and sea urchin, which I found oddly entertaining, except for the sea urchin. Eww. I know it’s a delicacy but gross. This was working out, I thought. For what more could a girl ask? Michael hadn’t even been fazed by my second date revelation that I worked at the Bubblegum Kittikat. I’d practically knotted my colon with anxiety over telling him and finally blurted it out just before ordering dessert and finally I came out with it, stammering something to the effect of:
“You know I didn’t mention that I worked in a strip club. The Kittikat. At the door. I mean. I’m not a stripper.”
He merely smirked, sipped his coffee and motioned for our server.
“Would you bring the lady an aperitif please? Benedictine,” he said.
“Oh, yeah. I don’t drink-”
“Hush,” he said, “It’s fine. I want you to try this. It’ll soothe your stomach. You seem tense.”
Michael regarded the dessert menu.
“Meyer Lemon panna cotta?” he asked.
“Sure, lemon’s fine,” I answered. I’d already realized that Michael liked doing all the ordering and it was fine by me because it saved me the concern that I might ask for something too expensive or too gauche and I’ll eat nearly anything anyway, except sea urchin and sushi, so it worked out well.
“You know, I just realized that we’ve been on two dates now and you never asked me what I did for a living,” I said.
“Does it matter?”
The waiter set a small glass of liqueur in front of me.
“This was developed by French monks and only three people at a time know the recipe,” Michael explained and I wanted desperately to say “So?” but I took a sip. It was sweet, medicinal and awful. I suppose I grimaced.
“You don’t mind that I work-”
“In a gentlemen’s club?” he asked, “No. It’s of no consequence to me where you work.”
“Well that settles that then doesn’t it?” I said. I took a bigger sip of the Benedictine and grimaced again.
After a month of this very platonic, very formal going to dinner on the weekends, I decided maybe Michael could be considered boy-friend-ish. Possibly? I learned my lesson about calling people my boyfriend too quickly, so I was still extremely wary. We hadn’t gotten physical, except for some very platonic, very formal, end of the night kisses, but Michael was refined and well mannered. Or shy. Or something. Michael was a tough nut to crack as they say. He didn’t ask me many questions about myself and in return offered up little about his own life. He was a commercial real estate developer. He clearly did very well at it and he spoke often and at agonizing length about his projects, but other than that he remained polite, aloof and mysterious, steering our conversations towards less intimate topics like sailboats, elections, books we’d read (thank you Oprah’s book club for helping me to not look stupid) and music. It wasn’t even small talk, because with small talk you normally discuss yourselves. This
was…I don’t know, teensy talk, smaller than small talk, but hey, the dinners were amazing and free and worth giving my Friday shift up to Sunny for.
My mother, ever interested in my love life, was pleased that I’d finally begun “dating” someone regularly.
“Are you going to take your profile off of Jdate?” she asked over breakfast, if you can consider eggs and toast breakfast at one in the afternoon. I’d worked the night before and slept ’til noon.
I scooted the omelet around on my plate while I considered her question.
“I don’t think so,” I said, “It doesn’t feel like we’re in a relationship.”
“Did you go to bed with him?” she asked, because my mother has no qualms about asking people things about their sex lives even when those people are her own children.
I shot her a horrified look which she ignored.
“No!”
“Well you ought to. You’ve been going out for a month now.”
On our fourth date, over duck and spider rolls (he made me try them) I decided to cuddle up to him. Michael was hot and it had been more than four months now since I’d seen any action. Dinner dates were nice but I was bored. I needed to add a little wasabi to the soy sauce here.
“Not in public,” he said curtly. “However, I’m taking you back to my place tonight.”
OK, well thank goodness I’d shaved my legs. I didn’t know what to make of this development at all. I said I wanted to skip dessert so we could get back to his place sooner. So far I’d only seen the outside of his building and I was possessed with a morbid curiosity to find out not only what was inside his apartment but also what was under his starched and creased couture. Boy was I in for a shock.
Michael’s loft that was all white. Everything was white. There was not a speck of color at all, except the grey concrete floors and a few metal trims. There was also not a speck of dust, a paper out of order, or even a little wisp of lint dancing across the floor. It looked like an art museum. His closet door stayed open and all of his shirts were in plastic bags. Each one of his Prada shoes were encased in their own cloth pouches and lined up an inch from the shelf ledge as if he had measured their exact placement.
Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat Page 24