I matched with this girl from a bad part of town. She messaged me first, so I said something back. Looking back, it wasn’t a good call.
I go to pick this girl up from her house, and I see that this place is on the brink of collapsing on top of her. I can’t judge too much, because I’ve lived in a few questionable homes before, but this place practically made of cardboard at this point in time. I’m thinking this probably isn’t a good sign, but I’m already there, so I roll with it.
She walks out of the house, and I’m moderately disappointed at what I see. I found her on Tinder, right? So I’m not expecting a unicorn, but this girl was definitely guilty of false advertisement. It wasn’t that she was objectively unattractive, she was just abnormally textured. It was as if her skin was aging at twice the speed of her normal body and had a kind of melting quality you might see in a Salvador Dali painting. Shit was weird. We’ll call her Jamie.
Jamie gets in my car and we start making small talk, and everything seems OK. I suggest that we get a drink, and she agrees, but she also wants to grab dinner. I say sure, and ask her where she wants to go. She tells me she wants to go to Denny’s, and I’m like we can do better than that. She responds, almost defensively, and says that she is dead set on Denny’s in a way that I can see there’s no wiggle room .Fine. **** it. A drink and then Denny’s. Let’s make it happen.
I’m driving, but I’m unfamiliar with the area so she’s navigating me. She tells me she knows a great place to get a drink, and I’m like if you’re the type of person who’s idea of a date is Denny’s I’m going to need one before we get there, so let’s go. We pass a liquor store, and this girl tells me to pull over. I’m scanning the area for a bar, until it clicks that the place she had in mind was this liquor store. Alright, this is pretty weird, but I’m thinking this girl is just being economical by investing in a bottle. I like a girl, who knows how to save a dollar, so I go in and buy us a bottle of Jim Bean (her call).
We get the bottle and I start driving to Denny’s. I don’t participate in drinking from it, because I’m the one behind the wheel, but Jamie does not play that shit. Before I could shift the car into drive, Jamie was slugging it back, like it was Gatorade. As a result, by the time we got to the restaurant, she was pretty drunk, and I was stone cold sober, so I take a few shots before we head in to catch up.
We get seated, and we’re both feeling good. We order, and this part of the evening is actually kind of nice despite the location. I mean, it’s not like we were discussing philosophy, or anything high brow but the conversation was pleasant. She asked questions about me, and it was all going just fine.
After dinner I’m still feeling a little buzzed, so I suggest that we take a walk. She says she knows a park nearby, Jamie grabs the whiskey from the car, and we head over. We stroll around the park, two mismatched star-crossed lovers. I’m admiring the weather and the sites around me, she’s drinking like it’s the end of the world. So things were going great. She didn’t even seemed phased by the alcohol, and the conversation wasn’t uncomfortable or awkward, and she’s even engaging me physically, so things were still OK.
Once we got back to the car the bottle was gone, but she seems just as sober as me. I’m driving her home through a heavily wooded area, when she tells me to pull over and comes after me like a wild animal. I stop her. I make a point to ask if she’s sure about all of this, that I don’t want to make her feel pressured, that I know she’s been drinking, and she’s insisting that she is fine, and it really seems like she is, so **** it. I go along with it. And an Act is performed.
After all is said and done, I feel like this was a pretty successful first date, and I thought that she might be on the same page. Then Jamie turns to me and says these words:
“That will be $80.”
An eternity passes in the time between these words and my response. I say, “What?”
She repeats herself.
“Hell no,” I say “That’s not what I thought this was.” Because if I did, I wouldn’t have come, I definitely wouldn’t have paid for her alcohol, and I sure as hell would not have went to dinner at Denny’s!
We go back and forth on this issue for about a minute, until she finally concedes that I’m right, which I was. Then she breaks down. She starts unloading some really heavy shit that’s she’s been carrying around in her head about her home life, abuse, and her issues with drugs, and I couldn’t help but be sympathetic to that. Because as fucked up this situation is, I recognized that she was a person as complex as me, who obviously really needed another human to listen to her. And so I do. I let her let it all out, which is by no means a short tale. This goes on for a few hours. Her talking; me listening to the avalanche of horrible, traumatizingly detailed stuff.
It’s late when the story concludes, and I suggest taking her home. And as we’re driving, perhaps both silently meditating on how much a sudden plunge this night plummeted into, she asks me to pull over at the liquor store to pick up another bottle.
bamainatlantaYou wake him up, you keep him up
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