“I am trying to pay for these croissants and she just called me a bitch!”
“First of all,” Tameka shrieked, “you are a bitch, and you a stealin’ bitch, too!”
She wheeled toward Lionel.
“She got a whole messa eggs in that big ol’ weird sack, you just go on an’ look!”
With the gait of a man long accustomed to being screeched at by women, Lionel started toward my hockey bag.
I was cornered.
I instinctively tensed up and crouched as I seized my stick for protection. I was fully prepared to fight my way out of there. Tameka and Lionel were looking at the business end of a hissy fit. That was one unexpected upshot to my hockey hobby—I would punch a bitch anytime, anywhere, with zero forethought or regrets. I briefly considered whether I had enough time to snatch my skates out, shove my hands inside them, and windmill out the door, flying fists of razor-sharp fury.
No, I decided, the stick is easier to maneuver.
Suddenly, everything seemed to happen at once; Lionel moved in, Tameka bellowed “Biiiiitch!” one last time, and I’m pretty sure I bared my teeth and hissed. Then, as the tussle for the eggs ensued, a dark flash streaked into the room!
“You git off her, damn it!”
It was Artie, half-drunk and wild-eyed, brandishing a large glass object in each hand.
“Artie! What are you—”
“Jus’ run, run, girl!” He paused briefly to confront Lionel and Tameka, and I finally identified his weapons of choice: two empty bottles of blackberry brandy. “Run!”
I finally snapped into action and started to hustle past him and out of the store. Lionel and Tameka were useless to stop me. They were either too scared or too confused.
But as soon as I was past them, Lionel lunged for Artie, who began swinging the bottles wildly. What ensued was less of an actual beat-down and more of a tween-girl slap fight. Both men were shrieking like bats, and in the heat of battle, Artie dropped the bottles onto my hockey bag. There was a sickening thud, and I heard the eggs crack, but better the eggs than our skulls. I grabbed Artie by the collar and bolted.
I still don’t know how I did it, but I managed to get my bag, stick, forty-eight oozing eggs, bacon, and a homeless man out of the store in one fell swoop.
“That was the most fun I’ve had in four years, I tell you what!” Artie laughed, panting, as we lurched around the corner. “That brandy sho did come in handy, now, eh?”
“Man, Artie, I never thought I’d be so glad to see a drunk!”
We laughed and I gave him a twenty-dollar bill.
“Ohh no,” he said, “I didn’t do that for money. I did that because you’re like my guardian angel. And I was happy to be one for you!”
“Listen,” I told him, “twenty bucks is a lot less than bail money, so just take it.”
He grinned his toothless smile, like a wizened old baby, and reluctantly took the money. I headed home, leaving a gooey trail of egg matter behind me.
It took me an hour to get my equipment clean. Turns out, hot water essentially cooks raw eggs, and let me tell you, runny scrambled eggs aren’t easy to get off elbow pads and Velcro.
I scrubbed and cursed, realizing that karma had at last caught up to my less-than-legal charity. I could take solace only in the fact that my slate had been wiped clean.
But no. It hadn’t. The egg debacle was just a preview.
Eight days later, I was in the locker room suiting up for my team’s playoff game.
“What in hell is that smell?” said our left-winger. “Jesus, does anyone else smell that?”
Clearly, we were used to a wide palette of scents in a hockey locker room.
“It’s the stench of victory!” announced our massive goalie.
“Urrrgh, the heck it is,” said our coach, gagging. “Something’s gone rotten. That’s what that is.”
I felt a sweaty dread creep across the back of my neck. I recalled a line from one of my favorite movies, Inside Man, starring Clive Owen as a bank robber.
“The thing about evil deeds,” he said in the film, “is that you can’t cover them up. They stink.”
The bacon.
In the end, on the downside, I had to pay $120 to have all my equipment dry-cleaned and disinfected—twice. On the upside, we won that playoff game. Turns out no one wants to body-check the girl who smells like rotted pork.
Giant Douche Rides Again
When I moved to New York, people had all sorts of advice about staying safe. Keep your money in a waist belt, avoid the subway after sundown, don’t trust redheads—the usual.
But I wasn’t worried about criminals or gingers. There was just one thing I feared above all else: running into my ex, Giant Douche. I had met him before I moved to the city and our romance started out great but quickly soured due to my being overly awesome and his being—hence the name—a giant douche. How giant? He did the Blow Job Head-Push on our first date and later would rate my looks on a scale of one to ten in front of his friends.
Worst of all, he was incredibly successful and I was incredibly a waitress. An incredibly bad waitress. I was not, how you say, “born to serve” or “be obedient in any way,” so I loathed every single second of my tenure at the ninth circle of hell otherwise known as Houston’s midtown restaurant.
So you can imagine my delight when one day, in the middle of the lunch shift and wearing my Houston’s finest—clogs, a starched oxford, and black polyester pants that made me look like a highway patrolman—I rounded a corner and locked eyes with none other than Giant Douche. The eye contact lasted only a millisecond but I was sure I’d been caught, seen, exposed! For six months I had trotted around this city always just a swipe of gloss away from fabulousness, ready and willing to see him for the first time since our split, and now I was going to run into him while wearing a hairnet? The injustice of it just about killed me.
As much as I didn’t want to see him ever again, I had foolishly believed that when I eventually did (after all, New York wasn’t big enough for the two of us), I would be ready, no matter when or where it happened. Coming out of the gym? Fine. Mid–walk of shame? Fine. At the abortion clinic? Fine.
Anyplace but at Houston’s, with me not only wearing an apron, but one covered with mayonnaise debris.
Luckily, I had had enough foresight to craft a shaky Giant Douche Contingency Plan in the event of this very catastrophe; I had made my work BFF Hilary swear to hit me in the head with a pan if he were ever to come in. That way I’d have an excuse to stay off the floor (and if I was lucky, unconscious) until he left. But the night it happened it wasn’t her regular shift, and I was alone. No friends in sight. So I did what any rational person would do. I gave a new server five dollars to watch my tables, burrowed behind the potatoes in the storage closet, and hid.
“Giiiiirl, what’s going on?” Gay James asked me.
“My ex!” I hissed through the iced tea filters. “He’s at table twenty-four!”
“Oh, honey, no he ain’t. You ain’t been datin’ a hot, gangly mess like that. No, no, no, child. Gay James is not believin’ that for a second!”
What’s worse, GD was with a date, a chubby blonde too plain to even be considered ugly. But he looked happy and healthy and good and the way I’d remembered him in the few pleasant memories of our relationship.
I called my friend Julie, hysterical.
“He’s here at work! And he’s with a date!” I shrieked, hunching down lower into my potato fort.
“He’s on a date at your office?” she said, forgetting that I was still a minimum-wage peon. “Well, you should just go say hi and get it over with.”
Say hi? Absolutely not, no, false. I would’ve ended up just vomiting, or nervously admitting I’d slept with his roommate (twice) after we’d broken up. “Seriously, Shall,” Julie lied, “it could be worse.”
Oh, could it? I would have rather run into him at the drugstore while trying to buy Anusol ointment with food stamps. Or perhaps on my way
to a KKK rally. Or maybe fighting with a dog over a piece of pizza I found on the ground.
So I stayed hidden and skulked around the kitchen until my vile manager, Alexis, found me and forced me to take a spoon out to one of my tables. I slunk out, hugging the walls like a rat in a maze, and I fought the instinct to jab the spoon into my eye. My face burned with shame, and I was painfully aware that I was wearing clogs and smelled like bacon. Greasy bacon.
Maybe a Texan would’ve found that alluring, but Giant Douche was Jewish and found nothing charming about a pork-scented woman.
By some miracle, I managed to slither around the restaurant undetected until he left, and once the Xanax a kind colleague had given me to crush up in my iced tea kicked in, I breathed a sigh of relief.
But then, of course, I stupidly decided to blog about the incident. Only about twenty of my friends read Cherchez La Shallon, none of whom knew GD, so I thought it was safe to detail every ounce of my shame in my little corner of the Internet. But I didn’t have the foresight to realize that the blog was the first thing to pop up on my Google results, which of course he found and called me out on.
You should have said hi … was the subject line of his e-mail, with a link to my blog post. Searing with embarrassment, I considered several options: A) hang myself with my hideous green apron, B) ignore the e-mail and pretend like the whole thing never happened, or C) invite him to meet for coffee, sometime when I was clean and normally scented, and bury the hatchet—i.e., show him that despite all evidence to the contrary, I was still hot and fabulous. A better person than I would have chosen C, of course. And I almost did. But I realized that I could wash my hands all I wanted with as much anti-bacon soap as I could find and it wouldn’t do any good; the stench of desperation and shame tends to linger.
Hits and Missus
“Are you going to take me into the woods and kill me, Max?” I inched cautiously toward the Lamborghini. “Because if you are, I’m not getting in the car.”
He slung an arm over the white leather headrest and smirked with amusement.
“Sweethawt,” he drawled in his thick New York accent, “just get in the fuckin’ cah.”
This isn’t how most third dates begin, I’m aware of that. But Max was no ordinary guy.
We met during one of my mind-numbing shifts at Houston’s. I was aimlessly drifting around the dining room, massively hungover from my fifth straight night of partying until four A.M., when a short, wiry guy in a bespoke suit came sauntering up to me.
“Honey, I have a problem,” he said, twisting his platinum cufflinks in a way that implied power, not anxiety. He was short yet confident and looked a lot like Stanley Tucci. I wasn’t impressed.
“The bathroom is that way.” I sighed and turned to walk away, but he caught my arm. He was stronger than he looked.
“Nah, I don’t need the bathroom, honey,” he said. “The problem is, I’m in love with you.”
I bit back a chuckle and looked around to see if someone was playing a prank on me.
“I am,” he said, looking me dead in the eye, which, as a waitress accustomed to serving drunk tourists, was not something I was used to. “I’m in love with you, and I’m taking you to dinner this week.”
I blinked dully for a few minutes. Who was this guy? He was small, bald, had a slight lisp, and yet … there was something alluring about him, a dynamism that settled over you like a hypnotic blanket.
“Dinner?” I said thickly.
“Yeah, I wanna take you to Nobu this Thursday. You ever been to Nobu before?”
I was a celebrity in my own mind, so yes, I’d dined there many times with Jay-Z and Beyoncé, maybe an occasional brunch with Rob De Niro or dessert with Taylor Swift. But in the real world, I instead spent my evenings prowling around the Meatpacking District with Klo, boozing it up at douche castles like Marquee and Level V. We knew every doorman in Manhattan and would stay out all night no matter what the temperature or what time the alarm was going off, which didn’t leave a whole lot of time for fine dining.
But the scene was starting to get a little old. If you’ve met one smarmy promoter or washed-up model, you’ve met them all. So before I could think of a viable reason to turn him down, I found myself accepting his offer and exchanging numbers.
“So should I just meet you there?” I asked. I couldn’t really remember how dates worked; it had been ages since I’d been on a real, proper one that didn’t start and end on the dance floor at an after-hours club.
“Nah, nah, I’ll come pick you up,” he said, waving off the idea. “Where you live, SoHo? You seem like a stylish, downtown kinda girl.”
Most people wouldn’t expect a waitress in a midtown steakhouse to make enough money to live in the most sought-after neighborhood in Manhattan. Lucky for me, I didn’t require things like elevators, working heaters, or bedrooms that could fit two people at the same time, and thus I was able to afford a room in a sixth-floor walk-up off Mott Street.
That Thursday, Max rolled up to my apartment in a $100,000, black-on-black, S-Class Mercedes convertible. He was dressed immaculately in another custom-made suit—gray, with a pink shirt and lavender tie—and held my door open as I slid into the soft leather seats.
“Um … what do you do for a living?”
He smiled inwardly as the engine purred to life. “Cupcakes,” he said. “I own a cupcake store in Brooklyn. Sunshine Bakery.”
“Cupcakes,” I repeated flatly, trying to figure out how owning a bakery that I’d never heard of afforded him a car worth more than most Mississippi real estate. The truth was, I didn’t really care. He was rich, charming, and flashy. And considering I served prime rib for a living and wasn’t really in the position to be picky, that was enough.
“I’ll take you there sometime,” he said. “I’ll even name a new cupcake after you, how’d that be?”
I giggled like a piglet, so easily flattered. I couldn’t picture what a Shallon confection might taste like. Oooh, maybe a peanut butter cupcake with a razor blade inside! We could call it Sweet Revenge! I quickly made a mental list of people I’d love to give a Sweet Revenge to, before snapping back into reality. I still wanted some basic info on this guy.
“So where are you from, anyway?”
“France.”
He said his last name was LeCavalier, but he didn’t look French at all; he looked Italian. But whatever, America’s the melting pot, blah blah blah—did I mention the $100,000 car? As we pulled up to the restaurant, he reached across my lap to lock the glove box, and I saw what looked like the edge of a tattoo peeking out of his collar.
“Do you have a tattoo on your back?”
“Umm … no,” he said, “not really.”
“Not really? It’s kind of a yes-or-no question, Max.”
He leaned over, caressed my cheek softly with his hand, and said, “You’re beautiful, you know that?”
Tattoo what? Who? Huh? I melted like a sack of sugar left out in the rain. I’m such a sucker for a sweet talker.
Dinner was delicious and lavish, and he asked me endless questions about myself, but not in an interrogative way, like most guys. He actually seemed to be listening and interested. I realize now that he was merely trying to deflect attention away from himself, but at the time his mystery only made me like him more.
After dinner he suggested dessert at a rice pudding joint by my house. Now, the concept of rice pudding is very foreign to West Coasters. Rice and pudding were never two things any Californian had considered combining; we’re a fro-yo sort of people. But I didn’t want to look provincial so I agreed to give it a go.
He ordered me a cup of chocolate vomit (I mean rice pudding) as I got us a table. He seemed to know the manager and didn’t even bother trying to pay.
“Here you go, doll-face,” Max said, kissing me on the cheek and plopping a bowl of mucus-like “dessert” in front of me. “I need to go take care of something, stay here.”
In a flash he had disappeared through the employee
s-only door, leaving me to poke at the gelatinous mass. I figured he’d gone to the bathroom, but a few moments later he reappeared, tucking something into his breast pocket and looking slightly agitated.
“Let’s go,” he snapped, grabbing me firmly but gently by the elbow.
“But don’t you want to try my snot pile—”
He leveled his gaze. “I said, let’s go.”
It wasn’t exactly threatening, but something told me not to argue. Bewildered, but thankful to escape the disgusting rice pudding, I trotted out to the Benz. We swooped around the corner to a pizza parlor and he parked out front. But as I started to get out, he told me to stay put.
“I just need to run an errand,” he said. “Stay in the fucking car—don’t let anyone touch the car.”
I had no problem sitting there like a princess, imagining that I was a rich housewife and very much accustomed to hanging out in jillion-dollar automobiles.
A few minutes later Max came ambling back out, taking yet another envelope out of his pocket and locking it in the glove box.
Before I knew it we were in front of my apartment, and he leaned in confidently for a kiss. I really wasn’t that attracted to him, but I didn’t have anyone better to kiss at the moment, so I let him. He didn’t try to push for more than a PG-13 smooch, which struck me as very strange indeed. Men in New York expect a visit to third base if they so much as buy you a Bud Light, never mind a $200 dinner. But Max had an oddly patient quality and it was refreshing.
I agreed to meet him the following week for supper at Fiamma, another fabulously expensive restaurant I had no hope of affording on my own.
“I’ve never heard of his cupcake shop,” said Pfeiffer, my roommate and fellow pastryophile, as she trolled the Internet looking for Sunshine Bakery.
“Whatever.” I shrugged. “I don’t really care.” But I had to admit, there was something off about Max, something he seemed to be hiding. Part of me wanted to get to the bottom of it, but the lazier, more dominant part of me was excited for another splashy night out.
Exes and Ohs Page 2
