The Last First Date

Originally performed at Stranger Stories at Acoustic Java in
 Providence, RI on Thursday, January 29th.

Shortly after leaving college, I decided it was time to become famous.

I went about it the way everybody did between the year 2000 and 2010--
I started a blog where I did the same thing a bunch of times then waited
for Oprah to call.

My blog was called “100 Boys, 100 Dates” or “100 Dates, 100 Boys.” 
I don’t remember exactly how it was worded, but it involved me
spending a year going on a bunch of dates with various men
and then writing about it.

It was sort of like Sex and the City if Sex and the City was written
by a skinny gay man who cringes at the thought of romance,
true love, or connecting with another human being.

As you can imagine, the blog was a rousing success.

Dozens upon two dozen people read it religiously, and for a
year, everyone who dated me either begged me not to put
them in the blog or begged me to put them in the blog, and
it’s hard to say which group was better.

The ones who didn’t want to be written about usually were
usually nice and not worth writing about and the ones who
did want to be written about were usually great in bed and
absolutely out of their minds.

Being in my early twenties, I really liked the ones who
wanted to be written about and spent most of my time
falling in love and filing restraining orders.

In the span of a year, I probably went on more than a
hundred and fifty dates, because many of them didn’t
seem blog-able.  There was only one that was so ridiculous,
I felt that I couldn’t write about it, and I never have.

Until now.

As I got near Date #100, I tried really hard to pick a date
that would close out the entire project with a bang.  Over the
course of twelve months, I’d dated everybody from frat boys
to guys with vampire fetishes to a guy named Scooter who
became a good friend after he made me watch Trainspotting
and then asked me to choke him.

That meant finding the perfect conclusion to the series
was not going to be easy.

Luckily for me, I had a friend who had recently tried
online dating and he sent me all the guys he deemed
too insane to meet.

From that batch of winners, I picked my poison.

We’ll call him Charles, because his name was Charles.

He lived in Pawtucket with his parents.  Now, there’s
nothing wrong with living with your parents, but I was
surprised to hear that he also “operated a club and lounge”
from inside his parent’s house.  Also, I really don’t know
the difference between a club and a lounge, but I assume
one is more chill than the other.

We met at his house so he could show me the club/lounge,
which turned out to be...a basement.  There was an air
hockey table, a miniature jukebox, an assortment of
recliners that he had acquired from yard sales, and not
one--but four--lava lamps.

I was immediately smitten.

Not being that kind of girl, I only spent a few minutes in
his basement before I started sneezing uncontrollably
due to the likely presence of black mold, and we headed
off to dinner.

After we were seating at TGIFriday’s, Charles proceeded
to tell me all about how he had only recently started dating
guys, because girls quote--”Just don’t get him.”

I don’t want to pretend to have all the answers about what
makes someone gay or not gay, but the opposite sex
thinking that the gentlemen’s speakeasy in your mom’s
basement is lame isn’t really something that should send
you into the arms of a man.

Charles ordered a few different appetizers, but then skipped
getting an entree saying he would just “eat some of whatever
I ordered.”

Fun fact about me--I hate it when people eat off my plate.

Fun fact about Charles--he likes eating off other people’s plates
and he is not very generous with his appetizers.

I reached for a mozzarella stick and he shot me a look that
would have frozen the pot stickers right on the red plastic
plate they were glued to.

Charles told me he wanted a career in making music.  He
admitted to not being a singer or musician and he couldn’t
read music nor did he have any interest in learning.  Instead,
he liked to read the Bible and then make up songs about
different psalms set to pre-existing music.

While we waited for my burger to show up, he sang me
a song from the Old Testament set to Mandy Moore’s “Candy.”

The fascinating part about this was that Charles was in
no way religious.  He told me he didn’t believe in church,
because he preferred a more democratic approach to
faith.  His long-term goal for his basement club was to
host Saturday night revivals like the ones usually held
under a tent in the South.  He didn’t know much about
talking to snakes or healing the sick, but he did see a
movie once where a man laid hands on another man
during an exorcism and he told me that he found it to
be “very hot.”

“Religious people are where the money’s at,” he told me,
eating the last of my french fries, “You get to write to
an audience who can financially support you.  I want
to buy a pool table for my club, so I need to keep an
eye on the bottom line.”

We ate quickly and I thought that would be the end of
the date.  It wasn’t the blockbuster I had been hoping
for, but the problem with intentionally going on a bad
date so you can write about it is that you first have to
live through the bad date.

If you’re wondering if I told Charles I was going to write
about him, I did.  He loved the idea and told me to make
sure I mentioned the air hockey table in his club.  I
assured him I would.

These days, I would never go out of my way to mock
someone who doesn’t realize they’re being mocked,
unless they were a Republican, in which case, yes
--yes, I would.

But back then, I had a different way of doing things.

Charles looked at me in the parking lot of that TGIFriday’s under
the cool early evening summer sun having just paid a third of
the check (because he just had apps) and asked me if I
wanted to go riding Go Karts.

Now, I assumed that he meant an official Go Kart track at
some family fun center, which is awkward enough if you’re
on a date with a man wearing a t-shirt with a hot dog on it
that says “I’m a Weiner.”

Fortunately for me, Charles wasn’t talking about an official
Go Kart track.

Oh no.

He was talking about a makeshift track his cousin built in
his backyard in North Attleboro.  The track wasn’t so
much a track as it was a giant dirt circle with a broken
minivan in the middle of it and a dog named Eddie who
liked to chase after the Go Karts.  Charles and his
cousin, also named Charles, assured me that Eddie
didn’t bite while also showing me all the scars they had
on them from times that Eddie had, indeed, bitten them.

I was hesitant to ride in the Go Karts, but when in Rome
you eat spaghetti, and when in North Attleboro, you ride
Go Karts behind a raised ranch as your date’s aunt yells
out the window that nobody better be smoking weed,
because if the police show up again, she’s going to tell
them to haul all our asses to jail.

The Go Kart shook as I raced it around the backyard one,
two, and three times.  I beat Charles--my date, not my date’s
cousin--every single lap, and each time, he got progressively
angrier as if there was money on the line instead of just his
own, confused pride.  After the third time around, he stopped
the Go Kart, jumped out, and told me he had to get home to
work on his music.

On the way home, he put on the radio and composed a new
song on the spot about the Sermon on the Mount set to
“Hollaback Girl.”

He dropped me off in front of his house, and before I got
out of the car, he asked if I wanted to come inside.

I couldn’t tell if he was indicating that we should take the
date to the next level, but he made his motivation a little
more blatant when he leaned in to tell me in a sexy whisper
that his mom wouldn’t be back from bingo for another hour.

Kindly, I declined.  I never saw Charles again after that night,
but every so often, at a wedding or a really bad barbecue,
“Hollaback Girl” will come on, and I’ll think of him and all
those lava lamps, and I wonder if he ever got that pool table.