Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat

by Victoria Fedden

  “He donated the door frames,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  I knew this because in the synagogue there was a brass plaque on every single doorframe that said “Door frames generously donated by Hyman Lebenklutz.”

  “It’s a big deal to those people. Just go out with him. Don’t embarrass your grandfather. This is important to him.”

  I had to go out with Barry Schitt. I was making a sacrifice so that my grandfather could remain in the good graces of two hundred and some ninety year olds, most of whom could barely see, hear or speak but still managed to terrorize and police every minute going on in one another’s lives. How did I ever get myself into this?

  It happened at Passover. My grandfather forced us to endure the first night of the Seder at the temple with the other geriatrics, all rolling around in their Hoveround scooters, pulling oxygen tanks and wondering what everyone else was doing. I couldn’t even walk through the door (frames donated by Hyman Lebenklutz, of course) without being assaulted by a mob of angry old people all demanding to know why I wasn’t married and then speculating on the reasons before I had a chance to answer. Before the sawdust dry, sugar free, matzo meal cake was served, Hyman Lebenklutz took me aside.

  “I heard you’re on Jdate young lady. You must meet my great nephew. He’s a chiropractor.” He insisted, as if the fact that his great nephew was a chiropractor would cause me to suddenly swoon at the prospect of having my back cracked for free for the rest of my life if things worked out between us.

  A few days after Pesach ended, I received a phone call.

  “Hi, this is Dr. Schitt. Barry Schitt.”

  Naturally, I had long since dismissed Hyman Lebenklutz’s matchmaking attempts, so when I heard the name Dr. Schitt I thought one of my friends, probably Brent, was screwing around with me.

  “Come on. Dr. Schitt? What are you a proctologist?” I laughed.

  “Umm. Excuse me?” said Dr. Schitt,”I think you met my uncle the other night – Hyman Lebenklutz?”

  “Ohhhhhh. Yeah. Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry.”

  “My uncle got your number from your grandfather.”

  “Yes, right. Of course. Mmm Hmm.”

  “So yeah, I know this is kind of awkward. I don’t normally let my uncle fix me up with girls from his temple, but, would you like to meet up?”

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Barry.”

  “Barry?”

  “Schitt. S-C-H-I-T-T,” he said slowly, as if spelling it made it ok. The addition of a C and an extra T made all the difference, right?

  I should have spotted red flag number one right there. He didn’t try to make a joke about his name. If your name is Schitt, first of all you should really consider changing it to something less awkward. Second, if you decide to keep your name then for God’s sakes break the tension by making a joke out of it when you meet new people. You know your name is Shit. They know your name is Shit, and chances are, the new people are feeling very awkward about your name and are wanting to laugh about it, but feeling like that’s not really OK. Barry Schitt should have made a joke. Perhaps he was tired of explaining it, but who cares. Worse yet, I think Barry Schitt took himself too seriously and that is one of the worst character traits that anyone can have.

  Barry Schitt called the day of our date to say he was taking me to a very good, upscale restaurant that I had been to on numerous other occasions. I was glad, because the guy I went out with just before Passover had taken me to a salad buffet because he had a coupon. Now, I’m all about a good salad buffet. I am truly not above the lure of a good salad buffet, especially if they have an additional baked potato bar and a frozen yogurt machine. I do love the salad buffet, but I don’t particularly want to be taken to one on a first date just because the guy taking me on the first date has a coupon and clearly deems me unworthy of a larger investment. Nevertheless, I did enjoy my salad and frozen yogurt, but the real kicker came when the guy who took me there had the nerve to ask me for a blowjob in the car, while still in the parking lot of the salad buffet place. Plus he was five two, ugly and boring. Thank God I’d driven myself.

  You know, my grandmother (the other one who wasn’t Jewish and who lived in Delaware) impressed upon me at a young age that you always have to find something nice to say about everyone. You can always find something. The one nice thing that I could find to say about Barry Schitt is that he had a really nice car. As girly as I am, I confess that I really like to drive. By that I don’t mean that I like to chug along in Miami traffic for six hours with a migraine from breathing exhaust. I like to drive a good car. I can appreciate a well-made automobile, and Barry Schitt owned (probably leased actually) a current, navy blue with tan interior, five series BMW. I really wanted to drive it.

  Barry Schitt came to the front door and I admit, he wasn’t ugly. He was thirty-five (a little old for me at twenty-seven but still in the range), very tall, in good shape with thinning blondish hair. He looked a bit Michael Bolton-ish for my taste, but still, he wasn’t ugly. He also felt the need to carry a two liter bottle of Evian from the car to the house, because in the thirty seconds it took to get from the driveway to the front door, a person could really work up a wicked thirst. My mom, who had been much more excited about this date than me, jumped all over this one.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” she asked.

  This goes back to red flag number one, but Barry Schitt had no clue that she was making fun of him, and looked at her as if to say: “Look you dumb woman, can’t you see that I already have a two liter bottle of Evian in my hand???”

  The Chiropractor made himself comfortable in my parents’ living room. My dad was gone selling radiation free headsets in California, so Barry Schitt made small talk with my mom who told him all about her favorite topics gleaned from conspiracy theory web sites like how big corporations are taking over the world and how AIDS was manufactured in a lab to kill undesirables. Somehow that got into a discussion about pollution or chemicals or some such and Barry Schitt explained his water bottle.

  “I take it everywhere I go. You never know when people are going to ask you if you want a drink and I can’t take the risk that they might not have the proper filtration device. I also own a water filter company, by the way. I have some literature in the car if you’re interested.”

  He came back with not only the literature about the water filtration device but also a big jar of vitamins and literature about those as well.

  “I can tell you have some health issues. If you’d let me adjust you I can figure out which supplements are right for you.”

  And my damn mom let him start cracking on her neck and twisting her back until he concluded that she needed to stop eating foods in the deadly nightshade family and take twenty-five different kinds of supplements from his own personal line of all natural, Chinese inspired, powdered-spider-derived vitamins. Plus, she really needed to get one of his water filters and he promised to give her a deal.

  “So, if you have these great water filters why are you drinking Evian?” I asked.

  “I’m not. I’m just re-using the bottle. This is MY water inside.”

  Because how would we ever know the difference?

  What seemed like hours later, Barry Schitt and I finally went to the restaurant and in his car, I am not kidding you, he was listening to a John Tesh cd. DEAL BREAKER.

  Once seated, he would not let me have any bread. I really wanted some bread. This was one of my favorite restaurants and I knew that they baked it in house and that it was especially delicious and I’d been on Atkins for way too long (like three weeks) and my life was starting to feel like a permanent Passover fast. Besides that my weight had plateaued and without dramatic results, as you may recall, I refused to diet. Atkins was off for the moment.

  “Bread is toxic,” Barry Schitt explained, “It’s causing your dry skin.”

  I had dry skin? And it was noticeable?

  Later, he asked me about my job. It was inevitable. They al
ways did.

  “I work at the Bubblegum Kittikat. I’m a hostess. I keep my clothes on and I’d appreciate that not getting back to my grandparents please.”

  Barry Schitt perked up. I bet it was because he thought this made me an easy lay as that seemed to be the delusion held by most of my previous dates.

  “I love that place!! I’ve been there!” he said. “It’s really classy!”

  OK, no it wasn’t. The Kittikat liked to call itself classy, but as I saw it, that was only in comparison to some of the other strip clubs located off lonely highway exits, staffed by scabby crack whores and frequented by truck drivers who were probably also on the FBI’s most wanted list. The Bubblegum Kittikat thought it was classy because it had real glasses instead of plastic, matted red carpets and webs of velvet ropes, but no amount of cigars and martinis can make a place where women get paid to stick their twats in the faces of strange men, classy. I’m sorry. I loved the place, but come on. That Barry Schitt had been fooled by the Kittikat’s mirage made me lose any respect I might have mustered for him and what he did next just made me hate him.

  When our entrees arrived, the chiropractor made the server stay at the table while he took both his and my plates and divided the food precisely in half with his knife. He cut my snapper in two, dragged a channel through my mashed potatoes and scraped away all the sauce. Then he counted the asparagus spears, divided them and placed one half of the food on the unused bread plates. He then sent the original plates away and asked the server to box them up, while I sat in stunned silence.

  “I only eat half of my food,” he said.

  “I kind of like to eat ALL of mine,” I replied.

  “Well, there you go. And those potatoes are nightshade. You shouldn’t eat them at all,” he said with a little flick of his wrist, butter knife in hand.

  What exactly was that supposed to mean? Oh, and I totally neglected to mention that Barry brought in his Evian bottle and refused any beverage offered by the restaurant. Tacky.

  In some ways Barry Schitt had a point. Most restaurants do give you monstrous portions that no one person should ever eat and yes, this has contributed to the obesity epidemic. Mostly though, this rule doesn’t apply to fine dining where the portions are much smaller and the food prepared from healthier ingredients. The portions at this place were modest. I was starving. Dessert was totally out of the question I supposed, which was a tragedy because I wanted the white chocolate bread pudding with mixed berry compote.

  When we left, I explained my love of Barry Schitt’s car and asked if I could just drive it a little ways. Maybe that was a weird request, but at that point I figured I had nothing to lose.

  “No, no I’m sorry. No one drives my car, especially not a woman.”

  So I had to ride in the passenger seething to John Tesh until we got back home.

  I thanked him politely, relieved the date had finally ended. I may have been lonely and desperate but you couldn’t have paid me enough to be with a control freak like that with his damned filtered water and only eating half of his food. I couldn’t possibly live with that Schitt for the rest of my life. Not that that would have even been an option anyway because Barry Schitt never called me back. That I wasn’t his type had been obvious from the start and as a man who only ate half of his food, I’m sure he was looking for a woman who only ate a quarter of hers. To hell with that, I said to myself, as I went in, opened up my take out container and inhaled the rest of my fish.

  That was it for me though. No more blind dates, I decided. No more Jdates. I suspended my account. No more set-ups with strangers. I needed a break from the freaks; I got enough of those at work and when it came right down to it, I knew, although I hated to admit it, that some of the reason, ok a lot of the reason, why I wasn’t lucky in love had to do not with the weirdoes I was dating but with myself. First of all, I’d been convinced that all that mattered was what was on the inside. The morals of countless fairytales and afterschool specials drilled this notion into my brain and I believed that because I was polite and funny and pretty much always meant well that my good character would outshine my flaws, which were that I was uneducated, worked in a strip club (and not to pay tuition), came from an eccentric family and basically lacked all ambition, or as I liked to say, I lived in the moment. In those ways, I was the opposite of the man I wanted to date. I didn’t want a guy who was going nowhere in life, so why would a guy who was going (or had arrived at) somewhere want me? It was an ugly truth that I had to face. When I was with Evan, I made the comparison that I was Walmart to his Neiman Marcus. Evan was a morally bankrupt asshole, but that aside, maybe there was some truth to my metaphor. My mom’s late father, my Poppop June, had a colorful saying that I remembered from my childhood. He’d say people had champagne tastes with beer can pocketbooks if they constantly coveted what they couldn’t afford and well, when it came to dating, that sure was me and no one was going to look past my lack of achievement and my unstable history to admire the pureness of my spirit. Or whatever.

  But look, there were plenty of girls without big career plans or lofty degrees who still managed to snag the good catches so that wasn’t my only problem. Strippers for example. Maybe only one girl in the entire club that I could think of had gone to college (Cherish who worked at a bank) and they all “lived in the moment” too and most of them had men falling all over them, in spite of the fact that they were strippers and yes, a lot of these men had issues or were disgusting, but certainly not all or even most of them. I’d watched the way they behaved around men. They were nothing like me. On dates I was nervous, fidgety and probably aloof because I was so nervous. I may have been guilty of oversharing too soon because the first thing I told everyone was what Evan had done to me and I did it defensively, as protection, as if maybe these guys would feel sorry for me and go easy with their rejection, but none of them did. Often I’m sure my dates found me too passive in a where do you want to go, oh I don’t care wherever you want to go kind of a way. I could never find the courage to state what I wanted. I couldn’t flirt or play the coquette. It just wasn’t me, I’d thought.

  Whereas I kept my hands firmly to myself, the strippers constantly touched the men they set their sights on. Sometimes it was a subtle brush of their fingers; a graze with their acrylic nails. Often their caresses were overt, forward gestures: playful tousles and tickles, flirty squeezes and they didn’t just touch the men they seduced. They couldn’t keep their hands off of themselves either. They stroked their own cheeks, fanned their hands out across their necks, Brent lines across their lips with their fingertips, raked their nails through their hair pulling it back from their arched necks before letting their waves tumble back forward. Their hands never stopped touching the customers and touching themselves and the men ate it up. I couldn’t imagine myself going through all that song and dance. I wasn’t a touchy feely person. I’d feel like an idiot and I’d never flirt or make the first move on a guy because I couldn’t handle the possible rejection. I remained aloof because by keeping my distance I guarded myself from more heartbreak. It’s funny. I believed I wanted a boyfriend more than anything in the world but I sure didn’t act like I did, except I really did. I was an absolute mess. No wonder the only guys who’d wanted to date me had complexes about their penis size and made crank calls.

  So there it was in a nutshell. I couldn’t find a boyfriend because I didn’t have the personal capital required to date the kinds of men I admired. Had I known how to turn on the charm I could have circumvented my dearth of accomplishments, but I didn’t. Therefore, I had two choices: change or start dating losers.

  47

  My mom had taken to nagging the living hell out of me which was kind of confusing. The summer before she’d encouraged me to work at the Kittikat and now all of a sudden she’d started bitching about what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

  “You can’t work at the strip club forever,” she’d say, to which I’d reply that she’d been the one who told me t
o take the job in the first place.

  “You were in a crisis state. You needed something to get you out of the house and get your mind off Evan. You needed to build your confidence and have some fun but now you need to get serious,” she’d continue, “You’ve got to go to school.”

  But I was comfortable and the mere thought of going to school was absolutely terrifying. I’d found my place I thought and it was working at the door of South Florida’s finest gentlemen’s club. I’d settled in with the other misfits and in comparison to most of my coworkers I was normal, healthy and smart. Working at the Bubblegum Kittikat made me feel good in a “at least I’m not like her” kind of way. Life was easy. I lived with my parents. I barely had any bills and I made a ton of money while naked women entertained me into the wee hours of the morning, so why would I want to mess up a sweet gig like that? The thing is, I knew my mother was right and she wasn’t the only source of nagging. In the back of my mind, I don’t know what it was, maybe my conscience, ate away at me. I felt like Dorothy trapped in the Wicked Witch of the West’s dungeon with that hourglass overturned and I kept seeing that sand rushing out and piling in the bottom of the clear globe. Why did I feel my time was running out and what could I do to get an extension?

  But every time I felt that way I’d manage to convince myself that the Bubblegum Kittikat was my future. Yeah, maybe I needed to get my own place, but school and a career? Are you kidding me? I’d never been a good student. School gave me panic attacks. I couldn’t stand sitting at a cramped desk in a dull class listening to some idiot drone on and tap out tedious notes on a chalk board and what would I go to school for anyway? I needed a change and challenge, but I was scared of school, overwhelmed by the decisions it would involve. Even thinking about the registration process made me break out into a cold sweat. Paperwork. Folders. Organizing. Buckling my feet into a pair of Lucite heels almost seemed preferable.

  School, for me, was right up there with exercise. I knew it would be good for me. I knew it was the right choice, and that I’d be much better off for it, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually apply to my local community college. I’d think about calling the school or looking up some information online, maybe even visiting an academic advisor in person and then the thought would freak me out and I’d come up with a hundred other things I’d much rather do instead that were loads more exciting and I’d end up putting it off again and again.