I Suck at Girls

by Justin Halpern

  “Yeah, man. She’s totally cute.”

  “She seems cool,” I said, leaning on the bar as he dried some pint glasses.

  “Totally. She also sucks a mean dick.”

  “What?” I said, straightening up.

  “Yeah, she blew me a few nights ago,” he said casually.

  “She’s only worked here a week,” I replied, my voice cracking.

  “Yeah. I think it was her first day, actually. We got some drinks after work, blah blah, then she swallowed a load in my car.”

  “Wow.”

  “Oh, shit, do you have a thing for her?”

  “I just thought she seemed cool,” I said, slumping down on a barstool and trying to hide my disappointment.

  “My bad, man. I totally would not have done that if I knew. Next chick you’re into, just let me know right away and I won’t hook up with her.”

  “No, no. That would be … really weird and kind of depressing. I don’t really know right away, anyway. It usually takes me a little while to see if I’m into them or if they’re into me, you know?”

  “Yeah, but what if you just want to bone down?” he asked.

  I smiled at Nick and changed the subject. The fact was, though, that I’d never had casual sex before. Oh, sure, I had always wanted to. In fact, I’d spent most of my late teens and early twenties trying to. Eventually, though, I came to the conclusion that I was the male equivalent of a Toyota Camry. You know: No one ever says, “I have to have a Toyota Camry.” But most people who spend some time in a Camry start to like it. “It’s pretty reliable,” they think. “It doesn’t have a lot of problems, and it’s not bad to look at. You know what? I’d probably prefer a nicer car. But I can live with a Camry.”

  I had been shot down countless times after hitting on women solely because I found them attractive, and the experience was usually deflating, labor-intensive, and expensive. By the age of twenty-three I was tired of chasing women who usually chose to sleep with guys who looked like they weren’t even the same species as me. At this point I generally found myself motivated to pursue a girl only after I’d decided she was relationship material and that she might also be looking for something long-term. I usually went after girls I really enjoyed talking to, who were funny and often a little shy and awkward, and so far I’d had a few girlfriends, but none had lasted more than a year.

  I had my strategy, and I stuck to it—which meant I paid little attention to the cocktail waitresses at our restaurant. Their job was to get people wasted, and to do that they had to be incredibly good-looking and, more important, able to pretend that every guy, if he bought enough booze and tipped just enough, just might end up having sex with them. Because of these requirements, a lot of them seemed to be pretty unstable. Every couple weeks one of the waitresses would get fired for some minor infraction, like hurling a glass vase at a manager or snorting cocaine in the walk-in fridge. Heeding all these warning signs, I rarely spoke to the waitresses, and none of them expressed much interest in driving a Camry.

  So I was shocked when, a year and a half into my tenure at Avanti, a sultry South American cocktail waitress named Simone approached me. Simone was in her early twenties, with straight dirty blond hair down to the middle of her back, full lips, and bright green eyes that gave off the kind of intense, unsettling stare I had previously seen only on Tom Cruise when he was discussing Scientology. Simone’s butt protruded from the rest of her body as if it were itself a sentient being, capable of complex thought. She was so attractive that once, when I tried to pleasure myself to thoughts of her, my imagination couldn’t conjure up a plausible scenario in which she would agree to have sex with me, and I was forced to stop altogether.

  “Where do you live?” she said now, as I folded napkins on the bar in preparation for that night’s dinner rush.

  “Right outside Hollywood. Where do you live?” I asked.

  “How come you never talk to me?” she said, ignoring my question.

  “Um, I don’t know. You guys seem really busy over there.”

  “You should talk to me,” she said, then walked away toward two customers sitting in the lounge next to the bar.

  Nick had been listening in on the exchange from behind the bar.

  “That was weird,” I said when he came by.

  “That chick’s crazy. She’s trying to be a model, but she, like, also sells rabbit painkillers or something.”

  “What?”

  “I think she has a rabbit, and the rabbit has, like, cancer or something, and she gets the painkillers for the rabbit, but then she sells them to people. I guess it gets you fucked up.”

  “Does she give any of them to the rabbit?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, man. She’s smoking hot, though.”

  “That’s a weird thing to say—‘You should talk to me,’” I said, playing the conversation back in my head.

  “Maybe she’s into you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I went about the rest of my shift—and then the rest of the week—without speaking to Simone. I assumed she was just another really attractive woman who wouldn’t in a million years hook up with me, so I figured I’d spare myself the awkwardness that would inevitably come if I went for it.

  One night the following week, while we were in the middle of a dinner rush, I was pouring a couple Diet Cokes at the soda station when I turned to find Simone standing in front of me.

  “We should have dinner tonight,” she said, as if we’d been talking about it for the last ten minutes.

  “I’m working till close tonight,” I said, as I popped lemon wedges into the sodas.

  “I am too.”

  “So…”

  “I don’t have dinner when people say I should have dinner. I have dinner when my body tells me to have dinner,” she said.

  “Well, I usually have dinner at around seven, so I kinda already ate,” I said.

  “You can watch me eat.”

  “Um, well, lemme just see what time I get out of here,” I said, then pushed past her with a tray filled with drinks. I knew I wasn’t handling Simone’s advances well, but no woman had ever come on to me so strong, and I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t want to end up the laughing stock of the restaurant, but I also didn’t want to pass up the chance to have sex with one of the most attractive women I’d ever met.

  I dropped off the drinks, then made a beeline for Nick and told him what had happened.

  “I’m telling you, I think she likes you,” he said.

  “Why would she like me? I haven’t ever talked to her,” I replied.

  “Maybe that’s why. Everybody tries to fuck her. I’ve tried to fuck her, the managers, customers. Pretty much everybody. Maybe she’s just thinking, how come this guy isn’t trying to fuck me? Or maybe she just likes you, man. I don’t know, but you should go to dinner with her.”

  It was a busy Friday night, and I didn’t get off work until one in the morning. I clocked out and took off my apron, which looked like I’d jumped on a grenade filled with Alfredo sauce. When I headed over to the cocktail waitresses’ side station, Simone was at the computer, closing out a tab with a credit card.

  “Hey. I’m not too beat so if you’re still interested—”

  “I made us a reservation at Wokano,” she said, referring to a popular late-night Chinese restaurant nearby. “We’re going to sit in a corner booth,” she added.

  “Oh. Okay. Well … okay.”

  Twenty minutes later we were sitting at a corner booth at Wokano, both of us still wearing our black work clothes. Simone looked amazing. She’d fashioned her work outfit, a black form-fitting tank top and wetsuit-tight black pants, to highlight all the appropriate areas. I was sweaty; with my silver tie loosened and my black dress shirt untucked, I looked like a used-car salesman who’d just lost ten thousand dollars gambling. She positioned herself right next to me in the booth, close enough that I could smell her perfume over the pungent odor of pesto and Parmesan cheese waft
ing up from stains on my shirt.

  That was not the most awkward part of our dinner.

  Normally, by the time I went out on a date with a girl, I’d already gotten to know her a little, and we’d hit it off enough that I’d decided it was safe to ask her out. That made it easier to hold a conversation over drinks or dinner. That night, however, Simone and I sat in silence until the waiter came to take our order.

  “So, you do modeling?” I asked after he left.

  “It’s just a job. It’s not my passion,” she replied.

  “What’s your passion?”

  “Life.”

  I waited for her to expand on that but was met only with silence.

  “Just like … living life? Or, like … you want to be a life coach? I’m not really sure what you mean.”

  “Just everything. Every day.”

  Over her plate of vegetable tempura (I’d already eaten, so I stuck to a liquid second dinner), we struggled through twenty more minutes of stilted conversation. “Fish are weird,” she said at one point. “Yeah,” I responded, followed by a solid minute of silence. It was the highlight of the meal.

  In the unlikely event that she’d been into me before dinner, I thought, there was no way she could be now. When the waiter walked by I lunged at him, shoving my credit card into his stomach before we were even presented a check. When he returned with my receipt, I quickly signed and suggested we leave.

  “Can you take me to my car? I’m parked pretty far away,” she said.

  “Oh, sure. No problem.”

  We walked over to the lot where I’d parked my Ford Ranger and let her into the passenger seat. She directed me a few blocks down dark Pasadena streets until we arrived at a white Lexus. It was around two A.M., so hers was the only car still parked on the block. The streets were empty.

  “Just pull up behind it,” she said.

  I did as I was told.

  “Can you shut off the car and get out for a minute?” she asked.

  “Get out?”

  “Yes. I’ll knock when I want you to get back in the car. Please do that. Thank you.”

  The first thought that ran through my head was, “I’m about to get carjacked.” But my car was a pile of junk, and I was more curious about what she was doing than I was worried about losing my car. I got out and stood next to the car, rubbing my arms to keep warm.

  After about a minute I heard a knock at my window, and I opened the door to get back inside. Simone was completely naked, her body gleaming under the light of the streetlamp pouring through the windshield. I felt like I was living out a bad porn narrative. And though nothing this kinky had ever happened to me before, I knew I needed to do something suave to keep us moving in the right direction.

  “Whoa. You’re naked,” I blurted out.

  In retrospect, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered what I said. She leaned over from her seat, grabbed the back of my head, pulled me toward her, and started kissing me. Her lips tasted like a mixture of liquor and fried carrots. I tried to keep my eyes open as much as possible, taking as many mental snapshots as my brain could hold, as if I were seeing the Grand Canyon for the first and last time. Then I thought of something: If she was naked, I probably should be too.

  As I started unbuttoning my shirt, though, she pulled away.

  “I’m not going to fuck you in a car,” she said.

  “Oh. I totally wasn’t trying to do—”

  “I wanted you to see my nude body. You’re very attractive to me.”

  “Thanks. You’re very attractive to me, too,” I said, instantly wanting to punch myself in the face.

  “Could you get out of the car again? I don’t like people seeing me change in and out of clothes.”

  “You’re like Superman,” I joked.

  “Why?” she said, genuinely.

  “Oh, just, you know, nobody sees Superman change.”

  “Why doesn’t he let people see him change?” she asked.

  “Well, because he tries to keep his identity secret.”

  “I just don’t like people seeing me change in and out of clothes.”

  “Okay.”

  I got out of the car. A minute later Simone emerged, fully clothed, and gave me a really sloppy kiss on the mouth.

  “We’ll go out again,” she said walking toward her car, my eyes trailing her. Then she got in and drove off.

  I went home that night completely bewildered as to why Simone was interested in me, but confident this was my first chance at meaningless, no-strings-attached sex—and with someone I normally would have considered completely out of my league. I was so excited when I got into bed that I couldn’t fall asleep for hours. If a burglar had tried to break into my house and rob me that night, I probably would have tried to high-five him and tell him about Simone as I helped carry my belongings out to his getaway car.

  The next time I saw Simone was the following Friday at work. Toward the beginning of my dinner shift, as I was lighting the candles on the tables in my section, she came over and invited me back to her place when our shift was over. A few hours later, after midnight, I found myself in her studio apartment in South Pasadena, sitting on her black leather couch, next to a large white rabbit that lay motionless on the armrest, while she poured two glasses of red wine. Still in her work outfit, she sat down next to me and made small talk for all of five minutes—most of which I spent trying to find out whether the rabbit had cancer (it did) and whether it was receiving its pain medication (unclear)—before we started making out. Ten minutes later, I was standing in her bathroom waiting for her to disrobe (still not allowed to see her change). Five minutes after that, we were on her bed having sex.

  Having sex with someone is a lot like cooking a stew together; if you don’t know your partner well, you just have to kind of guess what she likes and throw it in the pot, and at some point you’re going to add something that’s going to make the other person say, “Whoa, whoa, I don’t like that.” If the ingredient you toss is especially objectionable, your partner might say, “You know what? Maybe we should just stop and I’ll make something for myself later.” I had no idea what to throw into Simone’s pot, and I hadn’t exactly won Top Chef for my stew-making talents in the first place. At one point Simone stopped and said, “You should do less stuff.” Then she shoved me on my back and crawled on top of me. After a couple minutes she rolled off. “Okay, now do whatever you want to me,” she said, out of breath.

  When we were finished, she walked into her bathroom and shut the door. I heard the shower turn on. She stayed in the bathroom for the next hour, while I sat on the bed, trying to kill time like I was in the waiting lounge of a Jiffy Lube getting my oil changed. I knew I shouldn’t just go in, in case I walked in on her changing, the consequences of which I couldn’t imagine but feared nonetheless.

  Finally I got up and knocked on the bathroom door.

  “Hey, ah, I think I’m gonna take off. I had a really nice time, though,” I said.

  “Me too. See you later,” she yelled over the sound of a hair dryer.

  After work the next Friday, we did the same thing. As we did the following Friday, and the one after that, and the one after that. I got so used to having sex on Friday nights after work that the smell of Avanti’s Friday night bacon-wrapped scallop special began to turn me on.

  We never found what you might call a sexual rhythm. She mostly just wanted me to lie there and do nothing while she took advantage of the opportunity to sit on top of me. When I tried to “join the show,” the results were usually horrible. This was never more evident than one time when she started yelling, “How do I get so wet? How do I get so wet?” Thinking she was asking me because she wanted an answer, I said, “I don’t know?” Which only caused her to stop what she was doing and let out a long, deflated sigh.

  I did my best to ignore things she did that made me really dislike hanging out with her, like how she never actually listened to anything I said, or how she always said “disgusting” when she wa
lked past a homeless person. But our lack of any sort of emotional or intellectual connection eventually started to wear on me. One Friday night during the third month of our “relationship,” Simone failed to show up at work. While I was disappointed not to be having sex that night, I was sort of relieved not to have to spend time with her. Toward the end of the night, after the dinner rush, I walked out the back door and into the alley to get some fresh air. The back door to the kitchen opened and the dishwasher, a young Hispanic guy named Roberto, whom everyone called “Beto,” came out lugging a huge trash bag, a brown liquid dripping from its bottom.

  “Hey, guero,” he said, calling me the name all the Hispanic cooks called the white coworkers.

  “Hey, Beto. How’s it going?”

  “Hey, guero, I fuck your girlfriend.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend, but thanks for letting me know you think she’s fuckable,” I said, laughing.

  “No. Guero, I fuck your girlfriend. Last month ago. I fuck her,” he said, setting down the bag, then reaching his stubby arms out and thrusting his pelvis back and forth a few times in a humping motion.

  “What? Really?”

  “Yeah. You have the AIDS now. I am just kidding,” he said, laughing.

  “Wait, so, you didn’t fuck her?”

  “No. I fuck her. But I don’t have the AIDS,” he said. Then he picked up the trash bag and walked down the alley toward the Dumpster.

  I felt like I should be upset. In an attempt to drudge up some feelings of anger, I even stood there trying to picture Beto on top of Simone, doing his thrusting move and laughing maniacally, in the bed where I’d planned on having sex that evening. But the most upsetting thing was, that after learning that the girl I was sleeping with was also sleeping with someone else, I discovered that I didn’t care. I’d spent thousands of hours of my adolescence wishing for the scenario I’d been living for the past two months—having sex with a gorgeous woman who demanded and expected nothing more than sex from me—and yet the vacuity of our relationship was depressing me.