Tuesday, July 26, 2011

How to Identify the Downhill Slide of a Date.

I realize that some of my stories will provide absolutely no benefit to my son's futures. However, I'm hoping that some of these stories will truly do them some good and that they'll be able to escape some of the more precarious situations that I was apparently unable to avoid. This story is truly one of those teachable moments. It taught me and it definitely taught the girl. Now, this is going to sound bad, but I genuinely do not remember this girl's name. However, that is not because I'm some notch-in-my-bedpost jerk who was tagging and bagging tons of girls. In truth, I think the memory was too painful and my sub-conscious is doing me a favor by wiping the slate. Since I have no idea what her name was, we'll call her Melinda. Why? Well, she kinda looked like a Melinda, I guess. She was really cute and petite, but had a HORRIBLE personality. However, the hormones pumping through my bloodstream at 16 years old was a river just loud enough to block out the annoying, inane comments she made on a minute by minute basis.

Now, I'm going to be a little mean here, so bear with me. It's one thing for a girl to attempt manipulation and mind games. That's bad, and I've dealt with that. It's another thing altogether when the girl attempting to be manipulative has an IQ lower than most speed limits. She was not bright, so her attempts to control me were about as hard to spot as a marching band plowing through your living room. However....hormones.

Our date wasn't really a "date." It was more of an impromptu "let's go hangout." To be honest, she and her sister were being raised by a single mother that might have been a touch on the lunatic side. That was a LOUD house. I'm sure she would've jumped at any occasion providing respite from that three ring circus. So when I offered she gladly said "sure, stop by and pick me up and we can hang out for a few hours. I have to meet my mom and sister at Chesterfield's at 6:00 for dinner, so you can just drop me off there. Sound good?" "Sure," I thought, unaware of the impending horror show that would take place over the next four hours.

We rode around for a while and hit up the mall for some CD shopping. Noticing that she was a tad bored I decided that now would be the time to introduce the idea of the pier. The pier was a short pier West of Hattiesburg on a very quiet lake near a business that my friend's father owned. The pier faced West, and on a clear night the trees perfectly framed the moon. Perfect for a romantic escapade. I told her about the pier and asked if she was interested in heading out there to talk for a while. She agreed, and we were off.

We arrived at the completely dark parking lot, hopped out of the truck, and trekked about thirty yards through the woods to the pier. We weren't there long, and had no smooched even once, when we heard some rustling in the woods nearby. That's when I realized that her romantic evening was beginning to resemble a slasher film. She was apparently afraid of the dark and nature. Her cute little snide comments quickly shifted to freaking out in fear. So, I tried to calm her down and told her we would go. It was almost time to meet up with her mom, so the timing wasn't that bad. She's nearly sprinting as we cross through the woods once more, and arrives at my truck like she made it to home base without getting tagged. She breathed a sigh of relief that we had made it out alive. Sure, we were alive, but we were certainly not out of the woods yet.

As I scoffed, arrogantly, at her fear I tapped the waistline of my umbros shorts for my keys. Hmm, that's not good. I stared back at the woods in shock figuring I had dropped them while I was trying to keep up with the galloping ghost's frantic flee. The thought of re-tracing my steps caused a sinking sensation in my stomach. We could literally be here all night. As I explained to her our situation, she FREAKS OUT. She's sure that we are dead. Just then, I found my keys. They seemed to mock me as they gently hung from the ignition inside my locked truck. She seemed relieved until I explained to her that Toyota pickups were notoriously hard to jimmy, and that I had nothing in the bed of my truck to use to pop the lock. The only thing in the bed of my truck was my trumpet case.

You would think that now would be the time to join together to solve this problem. However, she chose another route. She turned her fear into rage and immediately began to berate me for my mistake. She couldn't believe that I was so stupid. She used words like asshole, brain dead, and loser to express herself. I was honestly impressed. After all, asshole had more than one syllable. She had obviously been working on her vocabulary words.

After surveying our options, I decided that we needed to walk to a nearby gas station to use their payphone to call her mom and my dad. Her mom was surely worried about her, and my dad would be able to help me pop the lock. The walk to the gas station, which was closed, was a little over a mile on a highway. I quickly marched down the side of the road as she followed three feet behind me. She continued to amaze me with her ability to find synonyms for the word idiot. After about fifteen minutes of this routine we arrive at the gas station to find that it has no phone. I felt like I was trapped in a poorly written movie where the viewer would be booing at the screen in disgust, unable to believe this unlikely scenario. That's when things really took a turn for the weird.

After a couple of minutes brainstorming over what to do, a car flies into the parking lot and pulls up to the pumps. Great, here comes the inevitable murder/rape scenario. The door to the car opens and pot smoke pours out. It's a group of teenagers, and out of the backseat I here "Jamey? What in the hell are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?" To which I replied, "What in the hell are you doing trying to get gas from a store with no lights on?" "Good point," the person said as he emerged from the back seat. It was Mike, my friend from an earlier posting. He and another guy from our school were out partying with three girls from a neighboring school. Two of the girls fit the script. They were cute, little preppy types that were high as a Georgia pine. We'll call the third girl "moonbeam." Moonbeam definitely stuck out in that she was not very attractive, dangerously skinny, and looked like she stepped right out of a 1969 peace rally. She wore a flowing purple shirt, bell-bottoms, and huge platform boots. She had beats around her neck and was wearing purple shaded sun glasses at night.

After noticing that she was acting very peculiar, Mike informed me that she was on acid. I couldn't figure out which emotion to cling to more as I described the situation to Mike. Should I be more embarrassed over this situation or thankful that help had arrived. He agreed to help and we headed back to the parking lot of despair. The car they were in had a coat hanger in the trunk so we tried for about thirty minutes to pop the lock using the old window method. But through all of our attempts the locks stayed locked. Now, I haven't mentioned Melinda in a while. Please don't think that the presence of my friends shut her up. Oh no, she was simply shifting gears. The more she whined and complained, the more Mike and his friends looked at her in disgust. At one point, Mike asked me why in the world was I hanging out with this whiny chick. My only response was to look toward her legs, which were nice, and muttered "uh, you know." He smiled and we quickly got back to work.

While our attention was squarely on the truck, moonbeam's trip began to take a turn for the worse. We didn't notice as she sprinted from the woods and leaped on to the hood of my truck. She screamed and cursed as she began to repeatedly stomp my windshield. She was tired of playing good Samaritan, and only the windshield stood in her way of returning to the wide spread panic concert in her head. She got about ten stomps in before we could remove her. Lucky for me, moonbeam weighed about 90 lbs. soaking wet and probably couldn't have stomped through my windshield if it were made of balsa wood. But her freaking out had turned all of us desperate. Mike grabbed me by the arm and explained to me that I would have to simply punch a window out. It seemed logical at the time. For Pete's sake, it was glass. How hard could it be. Mike ripped off his t-shirt for me to rap around my hand, to protect from the glass explosion that would surely follow. After five or six hard shots, I was pretty sure that I had shattered every bone from my pinky to my shoulder.

That's when Mike grabbed my trumpet case from the back of my truck and began to explore it's contents. He pulled out my trumpet's mouthpiece and handed it to me. "Here dude, throw it." I stepped back about five feet, aimed for the triangle window, in the corner of the passenger door, and let it fly. The window EXPLODED. Everyone cheered as if we had solved world peace. We hugged and high-fived. I thanked Mike and his merry band and they quickly departed. Since glass was all over the inside of my truck I laid down my t-shirt on Melinda's seat to keep her from getting cut up by the millions of glass shards.

Not a word was said as we set a land speed record getting back to Chesterfield's. Her mom was standing out front screaming as we pulled in to the parking lot. "You're gonna tell her exactly what happened. DO YOU HEAR ME," Melinda screamed when she saw her mom parading around the parking lot like a loon. I nodded in agreement as we pulled in. Just as I came to a stop, she jumped out and started pointing her finger back at me as the shouting match ensued. I simply put the truck in first gear and drove away, never to see Melinda again, thankfully. By the time I got home I was bleeding from head to toe. This was my penance for not truly seeing this girl for who she really was. From then on out I always looked for a girl who would choose to respond gracefully to adverse situations. Thankfully, I found one who hasn't called me a two syllable name yet.....

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