The only thing that sucks about hitting a hot streak when you are dating is that you’ve hit a hot streak. It’s like hitting that fat downhill ride on a bicycle, you know it aint gonna last forever but you stop pedaling,, stand on the seat a bit, and let the air hit ya all up in your face and all the while you’re thinking that with a good enough wind to your back, you could ride like this all day.
That’s exactly what it was like the week we hooked up. Not only was I with the hottest woman in the Bx (That is if you like them Latina, about 5’ even, soft brown eyes, curly auburn medium length hair that when straightened out just about hits the curve of their lower spine, toned upper body and the patented Porto-Rock bubble ass) but I also had offers coming in from all points of the city. Of course, like a suckah, I eventually turned them all down.
First to get shot down was the Italian girl that was working at the daycare center my niece was going to. I was dropping her off their every day for two years and didn’t think for a minute that she was into me. Then on a fluke I ask her out and she instantly accepts. It didn’t hurt that I just scored tickets for a Broadway opening and that we we’re going to meet up with some friends for a nice dinner in the city first. Here I am all looking like I am about to interview for some six figure position in Wall Street and she is looking just as nice and all I’m thinking about as she steps in to my car is that this date is a bad idea. If I had known that my weekend hangout was going to end with me making out with Señorita Right, I would have just gave Miss Thing here both the tickets and asked her to write me a review about it. This would have earned me a swift kick in the ass from my sister who, unbeknownst to me, was talking me up for a while at the day care and helped make this date a reality.
The play turned out to be a bust which would close within two months of its opening and this date was over even before it began. I was a gentleman throughout trying desperately to keep a conversation going but in the end I dropped her off home as soon as I could, gave her a peck on the cheek and ran back to Señorita’s house and crashed on her sofa after talking till nearly 3 in the morning on a work night.
This isn’t the part where I kick myself in the ass for flushing down the toilet a date that my best friend (who got the tickets for the Broadway show) and my sister (who promised she would never ever help me get a date again) worked weeks to put together solely because they knew I had the serious hots for this girl for months. Nah, that part I can actually live with just fine.
The part where I still randomly punch the mirror, even seven years after the fact, is when I recall how I gave up a chance to be the boy toy for the finest stripper this side of Scores.
Sasha was just one of those women that made other strippers say, “I wish my body could do that!†Guys would throw their whole rent money at her and she would smile, give them a peck on the cheek, give the poor sap cab fare to get home and then move on the sucker. Worse yet, no one cared. Her only allegiance was to her check book and every guy that walked in the door thought he had a chance to take her home. Everybody but me and the door man. My boys would ask me for years what the secret was to getting strippers to go home with you and I always told them the one rule, “Treat a stripper just like you would any other girl.†What I never told them was the second rule of stripper dating, “Make friends with the head bouncer.†The rest of the bar called him Greg but I used to call him Malone since he had an uncanny resemblance to Karl “the Mailman†Malone of the Jazz. Malone was a perfect gentleman in his double breasted suits and glasses. He looked like a super sized version of all the other lawyers and stockbrokers in this Wall Street strip club instead he was the law and order in the place. I don’t know why Malone liked me so much but I think it has to do with the fact that I never got drunk in the bar, didn’t throw myself all over the girls and never spoke to him like if he worked for me. In return, Malone gave me the dirt on all the girls. Who really had a boyfriend, who really had a girlfriend, who enjoyed dating, who hated everyone on the planet. In regard to Sasha, Malone warned me that she was all business all the time and she was an expensive habit that I shouldn’t pick up. He also told her I was a cool person to accept a ride home from, probably the highest praise possible at 4am. Sasha laid all the cards on the table from the jump. “Here is my personal beeper number. Share it with anyone else and you won’t ever get any ass again.†This all happened the weekend before the big kiss and once that went down, Sasha’s number got lost in the washing machine.
And I couldn’t be any happier about it all. The time seemed right to give up perfect blind dates and strippers that were paying for dinner. I was having the time of my life hanging with somebody that I didn’t have to invent conversation around, finally with the woman who I could share my silences with.
Looking back at that first week of hanging out, I think maybe we said a dozen words to each other every night before we would just start to kiss and get comfortable, fall back on the sofa and just lay there. Waking up in the morning with my arm numb from the way she had slept on it all wrong but me figuring that my arm was going to have to deal with it on its own. It was like a vacation every night but we also knew that vacation time was going to be over real soon. Her daughter was going to come back from spending the week at her ex-husbands in the next two days.