The first night that we were there we went to a bar called Cabo Wabo. Sammy Hagar owned it and rumor had it he was playing there that night. Danielle and I got as cute as possible and headed out for the evening. We started off at some weird street-corner taco stand that served tequila, then hit the local hot spots. By the time we got to Cabo Wabo, it was much later than we had anticipated and I was much drunker than necessary. We walked in just in time to hear Sammy Hagar say, “Good night, Cabo!” and exit the stage. Perfect timing, as always.
I woke up the next morning on the bathroom floor of the condo that we were staying in. My head was on a towel and I was curled up in the fetal position. I quickly noticed that I was fully clothed, and felt relieved. The last thing I remembered was Sammy Hagar saying good night. I had no idea how I ended up back there, alone on the bathroom floor. I wandered into Danielle’s room to find out what the fuck had happened.
Danielle was asleep on her face. I poked her in the back a few times and she rolled over. She immediately started laughing.
“How was the bathroom floor?”
“Super comfortable. I don’t know why I would bother with a bed. What the hell happened?”
“I have no idea. You said you were going to the bathroom at Cabo Wabo, then I never saw you again. I stayed out for a while and when I got back you were passed out on the bathroom floor. I tried to wake you—it wasn’t happening.”
There was no way I could have walked back; we were a few miles from the town and since I had no idea where I was I would have definitely gotten lost or kidnapped. I still don’t know what happened. I’ve considered getting hypnotized to find out, but I don’t really want to know.
“Let’s go get a drink,” I suggested.
“You’re my hero,” Danielle replied, and off we went to the pool bar.
While we were in Cabo we met a couple of cute boys from Quebec City who were ski instructors. They also loved to surf and told us that they came to Cabo every year to do just that. Both of them spoke French and their English was mediocre at best. Jackpot. The first night we met, one of them and I wound up in the pool at our complex, naked and confessing our feelings for each other. I had landed a French Canadian boyfriend named Marc for the remainder of the trip.
We had gotten to Cabo flying standby on some buddy passes. Don’t ever do that. We got stuck there for three extra days, waiting to get on a flight. We’d also been staying for free in that condo because it was owned by a friend of a friend I knew from bartending. So for the unexpected extra days it was occupied by other vacationers and we had to scrape together money for a hotel. We didn’t have much and winded up staying in a place so small that the toilet was in the shower.
When I finally knew I was getting on a plane, I called my dad to let him know what time to pick me up at the airport.
“Sorry, sweetie. Shirley and I are both busy tonight. Just grab a shuttle or even a cab. It won’t cost much,” he assured me.
Even though I only had seventeen dollars in my checking account at that point, it wasn’t the cost that bothered me. It was the fact that I didn’t have anybody picking me up at the airport. Family was supposed to pick you up; at least that’s how we did it in Arkansas. It was something that I was used to and now that I’d moved to California yet another thing had changed. The adult me now knows, get your own ride to the airport. Getting to and from the airport in Los Angeles is much different than in Arkansas, and it isn’t worth the hassle. If you’re reading this, which you better be, sorry I didn’t know that then, Dad.
When I finally got to Dad and Shirley’s I went straight to bed. The next morning they were both acting not only normal, but super happy, so I decided to let the airport thing go. I didn’t have many people to hang out with so I figured alienating them was not in my best interest. Instead I told them all about my trip and how much fun it was. I left out some details that most daughters should leave out—like how I had put myself in the position of getting date-raped by a Mexican cabdriver, and couldn’t say with complete confidence that I hadn’t been.
Surprisingly, Marc and I stayed in touch after the trip. He emailed me in broken English and I attempted to write at least one sentence in French with each response. I always had my English-to-French dictionary next to me when composing an email to him. It was fun to have a long-distance romance, especially since all I was doing in California so far was sleeping late and serving chicken wings.
Eventually Marc decided that he and I needed to see each other again. He invited me to come and stay with him in Quebec for a few days. He told me he wanted to fly me there and that the trip would cost me nothing. It took me about four seconds to agree to go.
When I told my dad that I was going, he was confused.
“How can you afford to go to Quebec?” he challenged.
“Marc is paying for everything!” I explained, excited.
Shirley was not confused—she was thrilled. She loved the whole story: I’d met a hot guy on vacation, we were still talking, he wanted to fly me out to visit him.
“This is so romantic. You’re going to have a great time!”
“Slow down, Shirley,” my dad warned her. “Why would a guy pay for some girl who he just met …”
It hit him. He looked somewhere in between proud and horrified.
“I have a conference call,” he mumbled and quickly exited the room.
I didn’t stop him and ask him why he had a conference call since he was still unemployed.
During the flight to Quebec, I was nervous. I’d never done anything like that before. In fact, it was really out of character for me. Although I have done a lot of things that probably seem irresponsible to most people, I didn’t and still don’t tend to make big moves without agonizing over it for days. For once, I had just decided to go for it. I liked Marc, he liked me, and I felt like that was all I really needed to know.
I had made some good friends over my first few months in California, but I was still lonely. I thought perhaps Marc was exactly what I needed. He was a ski instructor and I had no idea how to ski. I had an opportunity to learn something from him. I didn’t want to miss a real chance at an adventure—that would have been irresponsible.
Marc greeted me at the airport with a huge smile and two great biceps. He was even cuter than I remembered. He even surprised me with his English. I could instantly tell he’d been working on it.
“Have you been learning your French?” he asked.
“Yes!” I lied, hoping he wouldn’t test me.
He then said something in French.
“Learning it and hearing it out loud are two different things,” I explained. “Let’s just speak English.”
“Okay,” he agreed. God he was cute.
I stared out the window the whole drive to his apartment.
“It’s beautiful here.” I smiled.
“In French we say—”
“I said we’re speaking English, remember?”
His apartment was great, which was a relief. Most important, it was clean. I don’t want to date a guy I’m going to have to clean up after. His place was also well decorated and really cozy. I did notice one big problem and started to panic: There was only one bathroom and it was smack in between the bedroom and the living room. This offered very little privacy. No way was I going to risk going number two in Marc’s apartment and getting caught. It took me until I was thirty-four to live with somebody and even then I insisted on two bathrooms and zero discussion about what went on in them. Maybe that sounds weird coming from a girl who likes whiskey and baseball, but people have their lines and that is where I draw mine. I had to figure something out.
We spent the next few days going to long lunches, meeting his friends, and going out for drinks at night. Every place that we went, the first thing that I would do was go to the bathroom. After about my fifth time doing this, I returned to the table to find Marc smirking.
“You wan nex time I go with ewe?”
“What? Where?”
> “I get it you go every time. I didn see the hint but now I see.”
He thought I had some weird fascination with public bathrooms.
“No, I don’t want to have sex in the bathroom. I’m just …”
He was still smiling.
“Sure, next time meet me there. I’d really love to have sex with you in a public bathroom,” I lied. It was better than the truth. Now I’d just never be able to go to the bathroom again, ever, unless I was prepared to fuck him afterward.
Marc was funny and charming and his friends were just as great. They all found me extremely entertaining, which was a huge bonus. Toward the end of the week, we were going to a party on a big boat. Marc said they had one every year, and that all his friends would be there. Actually he may have said they had one every month—he still got most of his words mixed up. He also just kind of threw in that his mother would be at the party and wanted to know if that was okay with me.
“I guess it has to be okay because it sounds like she’s coming!” I shouted.
“Well … if you dew noh wan my mom to comin is okay,” he assured me.
“No, I don’t really care for a Mountain Dew but as far as your mother goes I just said it was fine!”
He may not have spoken English but he did speak freaked-out woman. He tried his best to make me feel comfortable while I tried my best to figure out why I was so panicked. Sure, for the past few days I had been envisioning what our lives together would be like, but that was for me to do in my head. The second he started showing signs of actual commitment I became my father’s daughter.
“I can’t wait to meet her,” I lied. “Is the fucking bar open yet?”
Despite my irrational fear of Marc’s mother, the boat party turned out to be a lot of fun. I really liked the people that he surrounded himself with. Now all I had to get through was meeting his mom. I wasn’t sure what I was so ramped up about; it was just somebody’s mom. I loved moms! In fact the only mom I’ve ever really clashed with was my friend Casey’s mom, who within three minutes of meeting me insisted that if I was single I must have been molested. And at this point I hadn’t even met her. That would be five years down the road. I needed to calm down. Where did I leave my drink?
When she approached, I saw myself through her eyes. There is the little slut that my lovely son met in that godforsaken Mexico. I can’t believe he spent the money to fly the tramp all of the way here. I knew that was what she was thinking, except in French.
Her name was Lynn and she could not have been nicer to me. She was doing an excellent job of hiding her disdain. She was the only person over thirty there and she didn’t stay long, which led me to believe that she had made a special trip just to meet me, which led me to believe that Marc had asked her to, which led me to believe he was taking things too fast. After his mom left, he asked me how he should introduce me to people for the rest of the night.
“What do you mean? I always go by Sarah,” I replied, clueless.
“I know. But when peeples ask who are you whut should I said?”
“It’s not ‘said,’ it’s … ‘say.’ ”
“Okay, then what should I said?”
“It’s … forget it. When people ask who I am, just say that I’m Sarah, because I am.”
“I know but who should I said you are? Should I said that you are my geerlfrien?”
Geerlfrien. The word caught me off guard, but in a good way. I could be a girlfriend. I hadn’t done it in a while, but I knew for sure I was good at it. I’d been told that in the past. I also liked being one. Plus it sounded so cute when he said it.
“Yes, you should definitely said that I’m your geerlfrien,” I said with a huge smile.
The rest of the night Marc and I were an official couple and I was enjoying it. We got really drunk, danced, and laughed. At the end of the night he insisted that we go eat poutine, which is basically the French version of getting your potatoes “smothered and covered” at the Waffle House. Thank God my new boyfriend liked late-night fast food as much as I did. We polished off four plates of it, then stumbled home to bed.
My last morning there I woke up and desperately needed to go to the bathroom. It might have been nerves, or it might have just been what a normal person does in the morning after four plates of poutine. Either way, I wasn’t going to be able to wait until we went out for lunch to make my move. Marc cuddled up to me and I thought I was going to die. This was not the time to spoon.
“I’m starving,” I told him.
“Let’s have breakfast here. I’ll make,” he suggested.
We’d gone out to breakfast every morning. Now, when I need to go out more than ever, he wanted to “make”? “Sounds good,” I lied. “Do you have eggs?”
“Yes.”
Strike one. “Bacon?”
“Yes.”
Strike two. “Potatoes?”
“Uh, no … but I can …”
Oh, thank God. “I’ll go get some!” I jumped up, threw on some jeans, and headed out the door before he had the chance to stop me or tell me that he was allergic to potatoes. I ran full speed to the nearest store and made my way to the bathroom.
That afternoon we drove around a quiet part of the city. It was really pretty but I kept dozing off in the passenger seat. At one point he stopped and grabbed some fresh raspberries off a bush. I was starring in my own romantic comedy.
“Framboises,” he said as he handed them to me.
“Merci,” I said back. I was pretty sure that meant “raspberries are my favorite.”
The drive to the airport that night was depressing, the flight home even more so. I got wrapped up in being his geerlfrien at the party, but once the moment passed I knew that I couldn’t really be. What I wanted was somewhere in California and I had to go get it. There’s a romantic me that has always wanted to be swept off her feet, but the realistic and ambitious me doesn’t believe in the fantasy—and if a guy tries too hard I end up thinking he’s a pussy. While I flew back to my dad’s, I wondered if it was normal that I’d rather serve chili dogs to a bunch of overpaid frat guys than let a hot French Canadian guy steal my heart.
TRUNDLE BEDS AND MASTURBATORS
A few months after I moved in with my dad, a girl I knew from Arkansas, Sarah Tilley, also moved to Los Angeles. She was living in Hollywood but didn’t know many people. She wasn’t someone I was really friends with. She was the ex-girlfriend of my friend Logan and I actually didn’t like her. When they broke up he was heartbroken, so I thought she was a bitch. When he let me know that she was moving close to where I was, I asked him why I should care.
“Because you have hardly any friends there and sometimes when I talk to you you sound like you have a really bad cold, but I know that you are one of those freaks who rarely get sick,” he responded.
“The air is different here. And I can’t hang out with her since she hurt you.”
“I’m over it, she and I get along fi—”
“What’s her phone number? Does she have plans tonight?”
Yes, I had some friends at work but the pool was small and karaoke with my dad was getting old. I was way too excited for General Hospital every day. It was no longer tuning in for the paternity tests and the comas. I was tuning in to see familiar faces. I needed more of a life.
My addiction to GH—that’s what the fans call it—was also costing me too much money. I had developed an affinity for something called “Soap Talk.” It’s a phone line that reels you in by telling you that you can call, choose option 5, and get some good spoilers. Then you learn that if you press 9 you can leave a message with your own thoughts on the latest storylines. You can be heard. I used to lie in bed at night and think maybe, just maybe, if I leave a convincing enough message they will hear my rational voice and finally let Sonny and Brenda get back together for good. I would drunkenly call the 900 number and leave messages for some poor intern who had to filter through voice mails from seventy-five-year-old divorcées and me. The first time Shirley c
onfronted me with my $450 phone bill my legs went numb. She was worried I was calling some sort of sex chat line. She didn’t seem relieved when I explained to her I was simply calling a daytime soap opera hotline. It probably would have been easier to learn that her new stepdaughter was a sex addict as opposed to a loser. I needed to get out more.
Sarah Tilley and I got in touch and planned to meet at a bar. I was kind of nervous. I started worrying about what it would be like if I still didn’t like her—or, even worse, she didn’t like me. I said a quick prayer that she and I would get along, certain that God had time in his busy schedule to make sure that I landed a drinking buddy.
Within minutes of polishing off our first drink, Sarah and I became friends. We both admitted we were nervous about hanging out, then both clarified that we were not lesbians, and went on with the night.
We met a handful of guys at the bar that night and introduced ourselves by last name in order to avoid confusion. I was really impressed with Tilley’s ability to get guys’ attention. She seemed to have no inhibitions about approaching them, which was really good for me. My hair still hadn’t grown out.
One of the nights that she and I were out, we met this guy that she liked and he wanted to take us to an “after-hours” bar. I didn’t know what that meant, but I liked the sound of it.
In my head it would be the kind of party I used to go to in college. I assumed that it stayed open later than it was supposed to and discreetly served alcohol in big red cups. It wasn’t. It was a weird house on a dark street and in order to get in we needed a code word. The guy we followed there shouted “Banana cream pie!” into the speaker at the door and we were quickly buzzed into the secret club. Immediately I regretted agreeing to go to that party. There was a little bar set up and the house was barely lit. There were folding chairs, tiny tables, and a filthy couch. Someone offered me a seat on it, but I opted to stand since I was fairly certain sitting on it would get me pregnant. Tilley was a little less freaked out than I was, but she was still on high alert. A woman walked by with a small tray and stopped in front of us.
Life As I Blow It Page 10
