"A Bad Date Isn't Always The Other Guy's Fault" by bandanna

Okay: I should have watched my drinking. But it was the heaviest summer evening, and I'd never had sangria before — I assumed it would affect me like wine. Four pitchers of the tangy, refreshing stuff later, I was barely legal to walk down the sidewalk in my second-date slut shoes.

Amal was drunk too, and we cackled wildly when I tripped over a sandwich board listing fifty-dollar specials outside the patio area of the restaurant, taking him down with me. Our waiter stepped over the low topiary wall to help untangle us from the sign and with a patient smile offered to call us a cab (Amal's exorbitant tip may have bought us some tolerance). I wasn't sure I should be in a confined space just yet, so we opted to walk for a few blocks as the first blob of orange pulp rose in my throat and I struggled to swallow it back down.

We trotted past the high-end bowling alley, arms linked. Wouldn't it be wild, my date suggested, if we got a lane? I giggled and agreed: having made peace with the bobbing bits of brandy-soaked fruit in my belly, I was ready for some beers.

On a Saturday at eleven, though, the wait for a lane was hopeless. "It could happen," the bored guy at the reservations desk said, and he handed us a pager. I put on my bowling shoes right away and started soliciting billiards opponents by shouting "I could've made that shot with a blindfold and a dick in my mouth!" and calling them "vaginas". Amal, meanwhile, brought over a second tray of shots and beers, having dropped the first one in a great crash when he was suddenly distracted by the black lights and descending disco balls of "galactic bowling", a three-song, twice-nightly ritual where the waitresses distribute candy-colored afro wigs and encourage everyone to boogie.

I downed two Kamikazes and began to dance wildly, ripping a green wig from the head of a surprised woman doing a watered-down Hustle with a group of work friends. Amal helped me onto a billiards table and shouted for the whole bar to come and see "this hot bitch".

After the management asked us to leave, and I had emptied my churning stomach onto their silly outdoor carpet, Amal made the best suggestion I'd ever heard: go back to his place with a bucket of chicken. We took a cab to the suburbs to find a drive-through KFC. By the time we made it back to his apartment, we were exhausted and starving. To my delight, I found an Absolutely Fabulous DVD and we tore into the chicken with animalistic ferocity.

Later, it was my pleasure to give Amal a drunken blowjob, laying across his lap on the couch with Ab Fab on the screen before us. I threaded my fingers through his ample chest hair and felt several dropped pieces of chicken skin. He was too drunk for my exertions to have much effect, but I could tell he was enjoying it by the agreeable noises he made. I gave up, however, when I pushed the hair out of my face and saw what he was actually enjoying: with one arm around me and another cradling the bucket, he focused intently upon the drumstick at his lips, happily gnawing on a bit of gristle.

I shrugged and reached in for a wing.

***

The Duel by White Flag

Aussim [name changed because I've blocked this guy's real one from all retrievable memory] and I interfaced on Nerve.com. He seemed normal and I accepted his offer to go out for drinks. We went to a fun dive bar in Greenpoint and he still seemed normal, so I accepted his dinner proposal. Everything was going well until he brought up the war in Iraq...

I stated that the people who live in Iraq will be affected by the American occupation for decades to come. Aussim vehemently denied this. He argued that the Iraqi people would have been experiencing violence due to a civil war, so the American presence there didn't really matter. To rebut, I pointed to Halliburton's reconstruction monopoly, detention camps such as Guantanamo Bay and the wall recently constructed in Baghdad.

These facts enraged Aussim and caused our discussion to escalate into a loud and heated fight. I repeatedly tried to defuse the situation feeling that a crowded restaurant was not the place to stake out a political battle, but Aussim pressed on. He even told me that my arguments were illogical and that I was misinformed. In a last ditch effort to call a truce I suggested that we should "agree to disagree." Aussim's reaction: "I hate when obnoxious white people think that they know what life is like in the Middle East." My terse response: "When your friends ask you how our date went I want you to remember to tell them that you called me obnoxious."

An awful silence took camp at our table. Scrambling to change the subject to something lighter and to fill the bleak moments until the check arrived I asked, "So...what do your parents do?" His reply: "My father works for Exxon Mobil."

The cease-fire between Aussim and myself officially commenced with a quick and awkward goodbye outside the restaurant. There was peace in my life until three days later when I received an e-bomb from him asking if I'd like to go out again. I thought Aussim's wanting to date a person who he screamed at, maligned and offended not normal, so I declined. Although I had resigned the date to the chronicles of the utterly mismatched, I still felt somewhat annoyed by Aussim's full on public belligerence and wanted to change my Nerve headline to: "...between I-rock and a hard place." I never did augment my headline, because then I really would have been an obnoxious white person.

***

"A" Student by Patrick Haas

I don't normally date my students, but Robin is 27, has huge tits and a southern accent, and besides, this isn't a date. She's in my English 101 class at the college where I'm an adjunct, and all she writes about is being lonely. Easy, I think, and she agrees it'd be a good idea for me to stop by her place on the weekend and show her around Phoenix.

She buzzes me into her apartment complex and opens the door with her hair pulled back into a ponytail, a half-drunk smile slid over wine-purple teeth, and her fingers hooked around her dog's collar. "Hurry," she says and leans back against the force of her Labrador lunging toward my nuts.

I step in and set the bottle of wine I blindly picked-out from the sale rack at Safeway and back into the corner of the kitchen, looking for a blunt object I can take the dog down with if I have to.

"GARY!" I hope she's talking to the dog, which continues to growl and snap his jaws at me. "GARY! Knock 'er off, my little pooper-puppy."

"?"

"He's my baby," Robin explains, and I notice she's a little wobbly on her feet. "But I think he was abused, so if you want him to respect you, you have to yell at him in a mean voice, ok? Try it..."

There's really no other option at this point, so I yell in my deepest, most aggressive, what-I-imagine-animal-abusers-sound-like voice at Gary, and he calms down. In fact, he lies on his stomach and rolls his eyes up at Robin who is kissing him repeatedly behind his ears.

"See?"

We finish her bottle of wine and start on the one I brought. After an hour of complaining about working at a Cingular kiosk, she jumps up and logs onto her MySpace page. "Look at what this guy said about me," she said then clicked onto an image of her in a genie costume from last Halloween, her red bra and panties showing through the material, and Gary sitting at attention be her side, his tongue hanging over his bottom teeth. I've said five, maybe six, words at this point.

Before I can suggest we go to a bar instead of surfing MySpace, she throws a Ministry of Sound CD on, and out blasts the techno. Robin gyrates her hips around, lets her hair out, and then stutter-steps backward until her ass is in my face where I'm sitting on the couch. I can't tell if I like it or not when Gary starts getting excited. Robin bends over and wraps her hands around her ankles, shaking her ass until she falls over. Her eyes are half-closed and she slurs something about loving "G-bomb" and then laughs uncontrollably. I step over the two of them, slip outside, and walk toward my car with the sound of Gary scratching his nails on the door growing fainter behind me.

***

Bad Blue Blood

Tall, six-foot-five, and with hair still covering all of his head and none of his back, this well-situated lawyer worked for a prominent law firm. He came from an upper-crusty, boarding-school background with old money lineage. He sounded promising. Relieved that he was in his mid-thirties, I looked forward to having a mature and intelligent conversation during our first date. We met on a Wednesday, at an easy-to-escape, nondescript, one-drink kind of bar. No chance to bump into friends. The initial conversation went very well: he sized up my attractiveness as I assessed his intelligence. We both passed phase one and went on to dinner. As a lawyer he had an affinity to argue and to draw conclusions. Since I only ordered a large entrée salad, he stated that I was anorexic. I told him that I had eaten a bit before so that I wouldn't be drinking on an empty stomach. He continued to declare my anorexia as he projected his own guilt for ordering an entrée and two appetizers. As I got into the game of arguing, we discussed politics, history, literature and then began the bar crawl.

Sitting snug on a small banquette at a busy, trendy bar, he began to order shots of Jagermeister. I refused them, he ignored me. So as he tilted his head back to down the shot, I dumped mine into a nearby abandoned cup. He couldn't conceive that I didn't want to drink Jager and continued to order more. I began to panic as my dumpster cup got nearly full. Unfortunately, his intoxication kicked in and the pennies began to fly. I sat stunned sober watching this graduate-degreed, button-down-collared guy fling pennies at innocent drunks leaning against the bar. From my corner I'd see them flinch, turn, then look back, confused, toward the bartender. As I questioned what he was doing, round two had already begun. With a penny balanced on his thumb, he'd fire up his index finger and send it off, airborne toward its next victim. Eventually, one guy figured out the source. So my date, in perfect lawyer fashion, approached the bar and quietly proceeded to flick the guy's baseball cap off his head. I sat shocked, wondering how I got there. Since my date was so big, the employee's looked to me to help and get him out without a fight. Once outside, he turned to me to ask, "So my place or yours?" — L. Taylor