My Worst Date Read online

  “Now here’s the story,” I told Macha. “This is like very big-time action I’ve got myself involved in and I’m not sure I’ve got the nerve to go through with it. Plus [don’t you just hate people who say ‘plus’ ?] I have to think about my mother, too. This guy, Glenn Elliott, is way, way out of my league but fabulous. He is also going out with my mother, which I think is great. He picked me up after work last night and I’d say from what happened, and nothing happened, that something could easily happen. Know what I mean?

  “I don’t like deceiving my mother even about working down at the Bomber Club, but what if she’s falling in love with Glenn Elliott herself? What kind of person is that, who takes his mother’s boyfriend away from her?”

  Macha had the hood of her yellow slicker up and she looked real cute. Rain was running down her face and making her eye lashes stick together and she was licking the raindrops off her lips.

  “Go for it,” she said. “Go for it, Hugo. This isn’t like you just want to get laid. You won’t say it but I can tell you’re really interested in this guy. And you know, Hugo, it doesn’t really matter who he is. Most likely he’s some Miami Beach phantom and we’re probably going to find out he sells drugs or he does drugs or he’s in the Mafia or something. They usually are. But if you run away from this just because it’s too much for you to handle, that’s bad for you. We’re just here for the experiences, you know. When we lay down to die, it’s what happened to us that we’re going to remember, not whether we’re famous or rich. Look at all the people we see all the time at my parents’ parties. They’re rich. Lots of them are famous, at least around Miami Beach, and they look terrible. Nobody really loved them, they never really loved anybody.”

  Where does she get this stuff, my Macha. She says the things I vaguely think about but can’t get off my lips.

  “You’re grown-up enough for this, Hugo. What if you never saw another guy in your whole life you could really be crazy about? Unlikely, but it could happen. And then all your life you’d be wondering about Glenn Elliott Paul and what happened to him and where he was and even if you found him he’d be old. You’ve got plenty of time, Hugo. He doesn’t. How old do you think he is? Thirty-five, -six, -seven?”

  “My Mom is thirty-seven,” I said. I felt like seven myself, personally.

  Macha was on a roll. “And for your mom, Hugo, you’ve got to think of yourself. If you cool it with this Paul guy, that doesn’t mean he’s going to fall in love with your mom. And your mom is another person as well as being your mom. She’s got to take her chances, like anyone else.”

  “But Macha,” I said, “she doesn’t have as much time as I do. And she’s a woman. And he’s a man. And I’m a boy.”

  “Pshht!” Macha was expressing disgust. That’s her noise she makes that’s somewhere between “shit” and spitting and throwing up. “You act like you can control other people. You can’t. He’s who he is. She’s who she is. You’re who you are. You just have to step aside and let the good times roll. I’m soaking wet. Let’s go to my house and watch some television.”

  When I left Macha’s it was dark. I’d asked Mom that morning where Glenn’s apartment was exactly and she told me it was a little Spanish type in yellow in the middle of the block, west side, on Michigan between 21st and 22nd.

  So, romantic fool that I am, I decided to walk down past there and see if I could catch a glimpse of him. Sort of Camille style or something. It was still raining slightly but I’d dried out and figured I’d walk past, hang a glimpse, and go home and study history for tomorrow.

  Michigan is a good hike, but not too far, and I knew the building. More like a beaten-up Italian villa. I walked down the opposite side of the street and all the lights were on in all of the rooms. I stood under a palm tree in the shadows and looked. Upstairs the blinds were open and the overhead lights were all on. He came to a window and looked out. He was wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans. He looked right across the street and right at me. He couldn’t possibly have seen me. I was really in the dark. But he just stood there and stared at me and stared and stared. I came out of the shadows and walked across the street until I was standing right in the light from his windows. He continued staring down at me. Then he said, “Hugo?” I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. He said, “Don’t go away. Stay right there. I’m coming down.” He came out the side door and came toward me very slowly. When he was almost up to me I started crying. I just couldn’t help it. He put his arms around me and held me very tightly and said, “Don’t, Hugo. Don’t.” But I couldn’t stop. I was all wet outside and all wet inside.

  He walked me up the stairs and continued to hold me. He didn’t really have any furniture. Just a TV and I could see a mattress on the floor in the next room, unmade, with some sheets and a blanket messed up on it. “It’s all right, my baby. My little Hugo. It’s all right. You’re all wet. And you’re cold. I think you should take a hot shower.” He turned off the lights except for the bathroom and slowly took my clothes off. I just held my arms up and let him strip off my T-shirt. He was very gentle and loving as he unbuttoned my jeans and pulled them off after kneeling down and untying my sneakers and pulling them off one at a time. I balanced myself by putting my hands on his shoulders. I was like a zombie, I couldn’t do anything but stand there and snivel and shake. I was a mess.

  “Come on,” he said. “You’ll feel better when you get warmed up.” He turned on the water. “Here, get in.” He looked at me all forlorn and ashamed under the shower and said, “Hold still. I’ll get in myself.” And that was how it really began.

  In about an hour, when we got up, there were clothes all over that apartment. I felt wonderful.

  I pulled on my wet jeans and he gave me one of his T-shirts. I put my undershorts and my socks in my raincoat pocket and he took me home. Mom was in her room so I was able to scoot upstairs without her seeing how wet I was.

  bomber club 2

  Backstage we got pretty bored between shows. Just sitting around that dinky dressing room with our feet up on the edge of the dressing table.

  One really slow night Coco suggested that we play “My Worst Date.” Everyone said they had really never had a bad date, or not really bad. And Maximum Shell told that stupid joke about “What’s the definition of a really terrible blow job? … Fabulous.”

  Coco Rico said, “Everybody always says they never had a bad date but then they start to remember. I’ll go first.”

  And he tells us about the guy he hung around with in high school in Ohio who always wanted to fuck him, but Coco never wanted to do that. But he was very much in love with this person, who was a forward on the basketball team and was dating a cheerleader as well as seeing Coco. And finally in the heat of the backseat of a car or somewhere like that Coco gave in and took it up the bum.

  “It hurt,” he said. “And more than that, in a few days I knew something wasn’t right. You know. I said, this couldn’t be come still coming out after all this time. So I had to go to the doctor. But I wasn’t so dumb. I went to a doctor in another town about twenty miles away and pretended I was visiting there. Turns out

  I’ve got the clap. Nice, huh? My virgin butt and the man of my life gives me the clap.

  “But. Really stupid me, I give the doctor my real name and address. I could have lied so easily. But no, I give him the real scoop. And whaddya know? In that county all the doctors exchange lists of their patients with venereal diseases. That’s right. And my dad’s best friend is our family doctor in this little burg I come from. They went to high school together. So, you guessed it. He tells my dad. My dad goes through the roof. Mostly because it makes him look bad, obviously. I refuse to tell where I got it. I’m not going to blow the whistle on Rufus. And voilà! You find me here, stripping in this sleazy hole in Miami Beach. Not directly, of course. But I had to get out of that town.”

  “What about Rufus, what happened to him?” I wanted to know.

  “Last I heard he married that cheerleader. I hope he got
rid of the clap before he did.” And Coco laughed like crazy, pounding on the dressing table.

  “Yeah, that was my worst date. So far,” he said.

  Then one of the dancers, named Calvin, chimed in. He’s known as Calvin Fine at the club. A great set of pecs. Dark hair. Blue eyes. You get the picture. You could kill yourself.

  “I was working in Chicago at Marshall Field’s. A salesman. And there was a company we were always ordering things from on the West Coast and I used to speak frequently with this girl there. Sally. Very flirtatious and cute sounding. And she kept saying things like, ‘I hear you’re very cute. Why don’t you come out here? It would really be worth your while.’ I was pretty AC/DC at that time and even though I was living with another guy I thought, why not?

  “So I called a guy I had spoken with at that company and I said, ‘What’s the story with this Sally? She must be a real dog going on like she does with some guy she’s never seen.’ And the guy says, no, she is really cute. An Oriental chick, very nice body, definitely worth checking out. So we’re talking on Thursday and she says if I came out we could go to Palm Springs and spend the weekend together and then she says, ‘Maybe you’re not man enough for this,’ and that does it. So I tell her I’ll be there the next evening. I book a flight. And you know, I have zero money. And I tell my lover that I have to go to California for the store over the weekend. Which he definitely finds a little curious. And off I go.”

  “I get to the airport, LAX, and pick up my bag and nobody. I think this is a complete farce. A hoax. All these people at the supplier’s are probably laughing their heads off at this jerk who flew all the way across the country because some woman dared him to. And then I see this Oriental woman coming towards me, and she is ugly. Very ugly and not young. She walks right toward me and I’m thinking, Oh, no, I’m going to tell her I’m not Calvin. Definitely not. And she walks right past me. It’s not her. I’m about to call after her, ‘Sally?’ And then I think, wait a minute, are you crazy or something?

  “And then, when I had just about given up, through the glass doors comes this great-looking chick. And it’s her!”

  Some of the guys were beginning to look up at the ceiling at this point. All this kind of gung-ho heterosexuality wasn’t going down so well. But I was interested. And Max was kind of into it, too. I think Calvin and he are the switch-hitters in this crowd.

  “So,” Calvin goes on, “she has her car. A convertible. And we’re on our way to Palm Springs and I’ve never been to California before and I’m thinking this is definitely hot. So hot that by the time we get to Palm Springs we don’t wait to look around. We pull into the first motel. Grab a bite and we are in our room. And I kind of roll over and grab her.

  “And get this. She pulls away and says, ‘What are you doing? I just came here to be friends.’ Friends? Friends! I couldn’t believe it. I was shaking. I couldn’t even stay in the same bed. I jump up, I’m getting dressed and screaming at her. How she’s fucking lucky she didn’t get raped. And she’s saying over and over, ‘But I just want to be friends.’ This is a nut case, right?

  “So I get out of there. Go to the motel office and spend every cent I’ve got to take a taxi back to LAX and take the red-eye back to Chicago. Leaving that cunt to cuddle up to her pillow in Palm Springs. Of course when I get home I tell my lover that I just had to rush back I missed him so much. And believe you me, he got his about five minutes after I walked in the door.”

  “I don’t get it, Cal,” Myrtle Beach said. “There’s got to be more to this story than that. Maybe she didn’t like you when she saw you?” Calvin gave him a look like he was the crazy one. “Obviously, that’s hard to imagine,” Myrtle said.

  “No,” Calvin said. “She had done that lots of times, evidently. I talked to the guy at her company and told him what had happened and he asked around and found out she had even got some English guy to fly from London to see her. And pulled the same thing.”

  “Maybe she was dying to get raped,” Max said.

  “Well, it wasn’t going to be me,” Calvin told him. “Imagine some guy pulling this routine. He’d have walked out of that motel with one very sore asshole.”

  Then Max told us about the guy who picked him up when he was still living in Westchester County, north of New York City. “There was this man who hung around the bar we used to go to. Very good-looking. Sort of like Alan Ladd.” Everybody looked blank. “Tom Cruise?” Their eyes lit up. “One of my friends took him home with him one night and he told me later, this man immediately wanted to know, ‘Do you have any toys?’ and my friend said, ‘Do I look so young I still play with toys?’ and the Alan Ladd type says, ‘No, I mean sex toys.’ My friend realizes this gent is trouble and so he tells him, no, he doesn’t have any sex toys. And the guy asks him, ‘Well then, do you have a hammer?’ He gets rid of him. But I’m intrigued. These crazy types interest me.”

  “You could get into big trouble, Max,” Myrtle said in the kind of voice that suggested he might have been there.

  “I always take my own car,” Max said. “So I can always leave. And I’m big.”

  “There’s always drugs,” Myrtle answered.

  “Well, yeah, you do have to avoid anything in a bottle you haven’t seen opened,” Max answered.

  “Even then,” Myrt responded.

  “Okay, so I was probably crazy myself, but a couple of nights later he comes into the bar and comes on to me.

  “I remember it was Memorial Day the next day. You know, the day when all the soldiers died.”

  I looked around to see if anyone else found this description of Memorial Day surprising. Nobody did.

  “And I think, I want to see what this guy is into.” Max is beginning to reveal some interesting aspects to his character at this point. I would never have thought this big blond lug would be this bizarre. Lesson number five thousand and forty-two in life, I suppose.

  “I tell him I’m taking my car, too, and I’ll follow him. And I do, right into the fanciest part of Bedford Hills.”

  “He was really weird. He walks into this big, lavish house and says, ‘Let’s get comfortable’ and takes off all of his clothes. And he’s not bad. He asks me if I’d like a drink and I take a beer. He pees in the sink. He’s really drunk. And he wants to show me something down by the pool. It’s dark down there but he’s mumbling about some bricks he’s put down and he wants me to see. I’m ready for anything. He’s got a flashlight and he’s kind of shining it around and I back into something sharp. I look, and it’s deer antlers! Yeah, deer antlers. I say, ‘What’s that?’ and he shines the light over my way. He’s got a dead deer in a wheelbarrow, right beside the pool. ‘Where’d you get that?’ I say and he says, ‘Road kill.’ He didn’t kill it I guess but found it along the road and brought it home. ‘For what?’ I ask him and he looks at me and says, ‘Oh, you know.’

  “Okay, is this a bad date or what? So we go back to the house and go up to his bedroom and he says, ‘Time for the toys,’ and opens the closet door and pulls out this collection of dildos and fist fuckers. You wouldn’t believe it. So I got him talking about himself. He had a wife and kids. And had just gotten out of jail. Maybe that’s where he got into all this dildo stuff. His wife had left him and was divorcing him. He had this crazy laugh. Every once in a while he’d interrupt himself and laugh like this, ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha.’ Hard, you know, like it hurt. Sort of like the Joker in Batman.”

  I said, “Max, weren’t you scared? This guy was really dangerous.” Max said, “Nah. Not really. You know, I had control over the situation. I knew he was kind of showing off for me. And I get a kick out of controlling things. You know, going out just as far on the edge as you can go. It was like that.

  “I asked this guy, ‘Don’t you ever discuss any of this stuff with your kids, your going to jail and so on?’ He gave me a look like I was the one that was crazy. And I split. But that was definitely the craziest date I ever had.”

  We had to go on in a few minutes, but My
rtle was dying to get his worst date out of his system. “It wasn’t so terrible. Not really. But it just struck me as kind of a disaster all the way around. This guy is on my case, when I was working down at that place where we used to paste frocks on Godey Lady prints. You know, those awful pictures of women’s dresses back in the nineteenth century. Like a shadow box with lace and stuff pasted on the picture. Anyway, there is this guy there who is real nice and he really likes me so I think, Well, come on, you’re not exactly the White Virgin, give the guy a break. He comes home with me.

  Myrtle Beach went on. “We’re in bed and I say, ‘What’s wrong, honey? Can’t you get it up?’ And he says, ‘It is up.’ Wild, no? I can’t help myself, I have to sit up in bed and laugh. I’m laughing and laughing and laughing. Not trying to be rude, you know, but it really struck me funny. So he gets up and goes home.”

  Coco said, “That doesn’t sound like your worst date. It sounds like his.”

  “Yeah,” Myrtle said, “I heard later he killed himself.” That electrified everyone. They really sat up and took notice. Myrtle looked around and hurried to reassure them, “Later. Much later. It wasn’t on account of me. I heard he was looking all over the world for his identical twin and couldn’t find him.” “He had a twin?” Coco asked. “No, but he thought if he could find someone exactly like himself he could be happy with him. But he could never find him.”

  “That figures,” said Coco. “You don’t like yourself but you think you could be happy with someone just like yourself. People.” And started putting more body makeup over his bathing suit lines.

  Our new dancer, Mickey Mick, had been sitting over in the corner through all this. I thought he probably was like me, our worst date was still coming up. Mickey’s probably about a year older than I am. Dark. Cute. He’s going to be cuter in a couple of years. From Connecticut, I think.