Tara agreed, then we all debated how to send him the message. I was nervous, though. Why was I sending him my phone number? We hadn’t even met! “What if he’s just trying to be nice, or just be friends, and all of a sudden I send my number all aggressive-like and creep him out?”
“He’s a Major League Baseball player,” Stephanie retorted. “That’s your reason for sending him your phone number if you think you need a reason, but I don’t think he gives a shit about your motivation.”
Moments later I sent Baseball Player a DM, saying that we should get a drink next time his team was in town playing. And of course, I included my phone number to “make it easier to get in touch with me.”
Tara, Stephanie, and I continued to enjoy our vodka sodas aboard the Amtrak, my favorite transportation method to Angel Stadium (a.k.a. “the Big A”). Seconds later, I received a text message: “Hey there, it’s me, plug my number in!”
My vagina exploded. Tara and Stephanie’s vaginas exploded a little as well; they really wanted me to get penetrated by Baseball Player . . . they’re good friends.
Next came a series of texts that were mostly constructed by Tara and Stephanie, as I was too nervous/excited/dumb to have any idea how to respond on my own.
“Tell him to have a great game today,” Stephanie ordered.
“Tell him you’re wearing a low-cut shirt,” Tara suggested.
“Ask him where he stays when the team comes to town,” Stephanie chimed in.
“Tell him you’re not wearing any underwear!” Tara demanded.
“Okay, too far,” Steph said.
“I agree. Plus, I am wearing underwear; I don’t want our relationship to start out with a lie.”
A compromise was made and I ended up texting him a photo of the three of us, now in our seats at the Big A, beers in hand, carefully featuring my deep V-neck T-shirt and zero reference to whether or not I was wearing underwear.
“You need one of my shirts,” Baseball Player responded.
Was that a statement or a flirt? I couldn’t tell. “What is he talking about? Why do I need one of his shirts? Does he mean mine is too low-cut and I look like a slut and he wants me to cover myself up like a lady?”
“He’s a Major League Baseball player,” Stephanie retorted. “He means you should be wearing one of his shirts, like from his team . . . duh!”
“Exactly . . . and he wants it on the floor of his bedroom,” Tara explained.
“We’ll handle this,” Stephanie said as she grabbed my phone.
I was terrified, but I allowed the girls to take complete charge of the situation. I clearly didn’t know what I was doing.
“Send me one of your shirts, then when you’re in town you can help me take it off . . . ,” Stephanie typed from my phone.
I was horrified. “This is too much too soon!” I told her. “He’s going to think I’m coming on too strong. He’s going to think I’m a slut !”
“He’s a Major League Baseball player,” Stephanie explained. “He loves sluts.”
“You don’t know a thing about him,” I argued. “Maybe he wants a nice girl who doesn’t send slutty things about getting naked with him the first time she meets him!”
“Then he doesn’t want you, anyway, so what do you have to lose?” Tara asked.
Solid point.
We all held hands and waited for his response. Silence. No response. He had been texting me back immediately thus far and now, nothing.
“I knew it. He just wants to be friends, or maybe he thought I was a decent girl, and now he thinks I’m slutty. I can’t believe I let you guys write that! This is so humiliating.”
“He’s a Major League Baseball player,” Stephanie reiterated. “He doesn’t want to be your friend; he already has friends . . . other Major League Baseball players.”
“Maybe he’s a nice guy,” I said, trying to defend him again. “And now you’ve gone and ruined it.”
I tried to shake off my disappointment and enjoy the game in front of me . . . the beer helped.
A couple of hours later, my phone vibrated. A text message.
The girls stared at me. “Is it him? What did he say?” they asked.
“I can’t look,” I whined.
“I can,” Tara yelled as she grabbed my phone. She and Steph looked at the message and smiled.
“Well, what did he say?” I asked, sweating.
“Oh, this is good!” Steph exclaimed.
“Soooo good!” Tara added.
“Well, what the fuck did he say?” They were killing me.
“ ‘Ooooh, that sounds fun. Too bad I’m not in town right now’ . . . along with that smiley-face emoticon with the tongue hanging out,” Steph read. “He really likes those emoticons.”
“He’s obviously sensitive! But what took him so long to write that? Do you think he had to ask his friends how he should respond?” I wondered.
“Sure, that must be it, he didn’t know how to respond to a girl flirting with him, it’s never happened to him before . . . that or it’s fucking opening day and he has a game in an hour and he was warming up or taking batting practice,” Tara explained rationally, but in a way that let me know I was really stupid.
God, she’s smart (except about Twitter).
The rest of the day we enjoyed the game and intermittently discussed my future as the girlfriend of Baseball Player.
Later that night, I was home—now sans Tara and Stephanie—when my text alert went off.
“How was the game?” Baseball Player asked.
Oh, shit. How was the game? I don’t know! I don’t have my friends here to tell me how it was!
I texted them so they could help me tell Baseball Player how the game was, but they were both asleep like normal people. I was on my own, and I was drunk.
Come on, Sarah, you can do this. You’re an adult; you can send a text message without having your friends tell you what to write.
I took a deep breath. “It was great.” No, that’s stupid. It was great, but that’s not the kind of response Tara and Steph would instruct me to give. I channeled their advice and started over.
“It was really fun, but would’ve been more fun if you’d been there to escort me home.” I stared at the text for two whole minutes then took a deep breath and hit “send.”
(Not bad, right?! And I’d thought of it all on my own!)
“That could’ve ended up being pretty fun,” Baseball Player quickly wrote back.
“Well, hopefully soon you’ll find out just how much fun I can be,” I wrote back, without even thinking about it. Man, I was getting good. Tara and Steph who?
“It’s a plan,” he responded.
I immediately Googled his team’s calendar. He was going to be in town in less than two months. I decided I’d go on a diet right away, then thought about it some more and figured I’d just wait until three days before he was in town and drink only juice for those three days; a much more realistic goal for me.
For the next few weeks, Baseball Player and I exchanged text messages. Flirts, photos (nothing too dirty; I never want my boobies on the Internet because my parents, although not completely savvy, do know how to use it), but mostly, we talked about getting together next time he was in town. That day was approaching and I couldn’t wait; the buildup was killing me.
So, imagine my disappointment when I realized that when he was in town, I was going to be out of town doing stand-up for my book tour. Fuck. My. Life.
I’d been working so hard on this tour, been out of town so much, that the only personal life I had at this point was my text relationship with Baseball Player (probably not great, considering there was a pretty good chance I was not his only “personal life”). And now this book tour was going to keep me from getting out of the texting zone and into the penetration zone.
“Thi
s fucking book tour is ruining everything,” I texted him.
“No, it’s so great and so good for you!” he responded. “We play there two more times this year; we’ll see each other then.”
Oh, God. He’s so supportive of my career, like a good boyfriend should be.
As we both continued our various travels, we kept in touch. One afternoon when he was in Seattle, he sent me a picture of the gloomy gray sky that said, “I don’t know how people live here . . . it’s so depressing.”
Ahhhh, he’s feeling down.
What makes people feel better when they’re down? Flowers! And he’s missing the sun . . . sunflowers! I immediately went online to have some sunflowers sent to his hotel but then stopped. I knew I wasn’t allowed to make this decision on my own. Also, I didn’t know what hotel he was staying in—there are a few in Seattle.
Tara and Stephanie liked the flowers idea; they thought it was sweet.
“Why not? I doubt he’s been sent flowers very often,” Tara said. “He’ll think it’s cute!”
Steph said to just text him and ask where he’s staying. “Just ask him what hotel they stay in, because you go to Seattle a lot and are wondering if it’s one of your faves.”
“But I don’t go to Seattle a lot.”
Silence on the other end of the phone.
“Oh,” I said. “Okay, I get it. Just pretend . . .”
Tara sighed and they both got off the phone so I could order the flowers. And yes, we do three-way phone calls as if we’re still in high school.
I was nervous, so I consulted one more person: my friend Liz. She has been divorced once and engaged another time, but that time they broke up before they got married. She tells me I should always ask her advice about guys, because she’s had two rings and I’ve had zero. In fact, she calls herself “Two Rings” when giving me advice and insists she knows better. I never retort that she no longer has either of those rings, so maybe her advice isn’t the best to take, because when I’m feeling uncertain her logic makes sense.
Two Rings liked the idea of the sunflowers. She said it was “thoughtful” and that in his profession he probably didn’t meet a lot of thoughtful women, “just a bunch of whores.”
Thanks, Two Rings.
I decided the idea of getting myself into a more esteemed category than “whore” sounded nice, so I logged on to 1800Flowers.com to send some sunshine to Baseball Player, along with a note that said, “Since the sun isn’t there, I’m sending you a little . . .”
I’M SO SWEET! I can’t believe I’m single!
I nervously anticipated his response—this felt like a pretty bold move. A few hours later, he sent me a text with a photo of the flowers attached and wrote: “You’re so sweet!” (Told you! )
I smiled and clicked on the image of the flowers to admire my work and was horrified to find that 1800Flowers.com did not send Baseball Player the sunflowers I had requested. Instead, it was just an arrangement of various flowers with like one-and-a-half sunflowers shoved in the middle. So now my sweet idea because of his text about no sun made no sense and it just looked like I randomly sent him a bouquet that looked like something you’d only send to a baseball player if it was for his funeral.
I immediately wrote back: “That was supposed to be all sunflowers! To send you sun in Seattle. Ugh, nobody ever listens to me.”
He wrote back “Haha,” and that was it. I was mortified. He probably picked the flowers up at the front desk, after his game, with all of his teammates standing right behind him, asking him who had died. Ugh, I’m such a loser. A sweet loser, but a loser nonetheless.
I immediately called Tara and Steph and told them my life was ruined, then I called Two Rings and told her that next time I wanted her to give me advice, I was going to remind myself that two failed rings doesn’t necessarily trump my zero rings. She laughed; it’s something I’ve said to her like thirty-seven times. Then she came over and brought me a bottle of vodka.
I felt like communication from Baseball Player tapered off a little after that. I might have just been paranoid, but it didn’t seem like he was as flirty as he was before. And the texts were coming a little less frequently. God, I hated flowers.
To make things worse, daily, I’d get an e-mail from 1800Flowers.com reminding me that I’d sent a big dumb bouquet of flowers to a Major League Baseball player. For some reason, I couldn’t seem to unsubscribe. I swear I tried—it was like a mean joke was being played on me every time I checked my e-mail.
Of course, I kept Tara and Steph updated on any and all conversation between Baseball Player and me. They figured he was just busy and soon things would “heat up” again.
They were right. Out of nowhere, our texting picked up again.
“Maybe he suffered a concussion and forgot about the flowers!” I happily told Tara and Steph.
They agreed, but also suggested enough was enough. This back-and-forth, high-and-low, was too much for them to take anymore. They informed me it was time to take this texting relationship to the next level: sex.
“He won’t be here until the end of the summer,” Tara said. “That’s too far away.”
Steph and I agreed and so together, over margaritas, we pored over his team’s schedule and came up with a plan.
“A game plan!” I said proudly, and laughed.
Tara and Steph just looked at me.
“Maybe don’t lead off with one of your ‘jokes’ when you meet him,” Steph suggested gently.
“But . . .” I started to defend myself and my “jokes.”
“Sweetie, no,” Tara said flatly.
“Okay.”
So the game plan (they aren’t here to judge me right now) was this: he would be in San Francisco in a few short weeks and I would fly up for a game and some long-time-in-coming “doing it.”
Unsure of how to proceed, the girls suggested I inform him of the possibility of my having the weekend free when he was only a short flight away and told me to ask him if he thought he’d have time to “take me out for a drink.”
“Of course!” he quickly replied. “Do it, come see me.”
The plan was in motion. I booked my flight.
“Look, he’s a Major League Baseball player,” Stephanie said (this had become her favorite thing to say). “He probably has a ton of twentysomething-year-old girls after him. You need to show him that you have your own career, your own money, and that he doesn’t need to take care of you. You need to show him that you can travel the same way he is used to traveling. You can be his equal.”
“Oh, you mean like how I needed to show him how thoughtful I am by sending him fucking flowers like a big dumb asshole?”
Steph and Tara stood behind their decision to tell me to send the flowers and disagreed that it had any kind of negative impact on our blossoming (pun intended) relationship.
“He probably doesn’t even think about it,” Tara chimed in. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, but I hoped she was correct.
Eager to show off my ability to travel like a big girl, I booked a huge suite at the Four Seasons. Fuck it; I’d been working my ass off. At this point I’d been out of town almost every weekend and my personal life was still suffering. I couldn’t meet men when I was on the road. I couldn’t “hook up” with guys I met at my shows; I didn’t want that kind of reputation. However, I could fly up to San Francisco and let a Major League Baseball player put it in me (by “it,” I mean “his penis”). Plus, I was pretty sure the only people who would know about my slutty adventure would be the friends I told, and I wasn’t telling many. I suppose this chapter kind of ruins that theory, but I’m trying to paint a picture for you guys of what this certain period of my life was like, okay?
Steph’s statement about “a ton of twentysomething-year-old girls after him” stuck in my head. I needed to compete with more than just my pretty-decent income.
I needed to pull out the big guns.
So I booked a series of body wraps.
The woman at the spa I made the appointments with was a little crazy, in a good way . . . whatever that means—I think it’s some sort of compliment.
Body-Wrap Lady poured me tea, measured my body fat, and made me drink alkalizers. I didn’t know what an alkalizer was; it sounded like something you’d use to measure your blood-alcohol content. Actually, I didn’t know what any of the stuff she was having me ingest was or what it was supposed to do, but she seemed to think it would make me thinner, and she was the pro, so I drank it.
She wrapped me in towels that were soaked in some sort of detox concoction and talked to me about what I was “holding on to” in my body that made me feel bloated. She got very philosophical about things and during each appointment I shed water weight in both sweat and tears. The tears came when she would diagnose some sort of mental or emotional block in me that caused my body to “grab on to fat and never let go,” but they probably had more to do with the fact that it was like one hundred and forty degrees underneath all the towels.
I ended up spilling my guts to her; I figured why hold back secrets with someone who had seen me completely naked, covered my body in a charcoal scrub, and wrapped every inch of me like a mummy?
After hearing all the details I could remember while suffering from heatstroke, Body-Wrap Lady told me I was being too assertive with Baseball Player. She said he couldn’t feel like a man if I was flying myself around and putting myself up in a hotel.
WAIT, WHAT?
This was the opposite of what Tara and Steph told me. So I explained to her that I was showing him I could do my own thing, unlike the twentysomethings who were chasing him around. She shook her head and said, “A man still has to feel like a man.”
She suggested I take photos of different parts of my body—like my leg and the “sexy” part of my arm (wherever that is)—then tell him there was “more to see” when I met him in the hotel.
This sounded kind of fun, and it didn’t involve a picture of my boobs or my Tweaky (I started calling it that when I was six years old). So that night I put on a little black dress and a pair of heels and attempted to take a sexy shot of my leg. But with every photo, I found a weird freckle or angle that I didn’t think was sexy. I tried to hike my leg up into a really flattering position and fell over, landing directly on the iron I had used on the little black dress just moments before, which was still scalding hot. Now I had a burn the shape of an iron on my ass and not one sexy photo to send.
Has Anyone Seen My Pants? Page 6