The summer after grad school--the summer I went back to Buffalo to adjunct and work at the diner--I met Bianca. You might remember her as Girl Whose Mother Sells Avon Merchandise and Porn out of Her Trunk. You might remember her as Sister to Fifteen Year-Old Brother Who Nails Panties to the Wall After He Scores Another Conquest. You might also remember her as Girl Who Thinks Nothing of Shitting on the Car of Someone Who Has Done Her Wrong.
I can't tell you how many nights she got so worked up, so rattled, so pissed that she'd grab me by the wrist and say, "You know what would make me feel better right now? SHITTING ON HIS CAR." And I'd say, "Yeah, let's go! Let's do it!" because there was nothing in the world as funny to her as the thought of me--a girl who taught English to kids older than she was--rolling my pants down to my ankles so I could help her get revenge at whatever boy she was toying with that second.
I wouldn't do it. Not really. I couldn't. But there was something about her--a young blond girl with tattoos of stars on her hips, a girl with a collection of sparkly tank tops and hoodies, a girl with a pink rhinestoned cell phone she kept in the pocket of her waitress apron--that could, that would.
And tonight I couldn't help but think of her when Josh got me on the phone. He wanted to talk about a lot of things--crazy girls, the government, his volunteer work, girls with mustaches, writing thank-you cards, giving Power Point presentations, the fact that the city of Buffalo won't plow his freaking side street but will send people to dig underneath feet of snow to distribute parking tickets to cars parked on the unplowed road--but the last thing he wanted to talk about was his friend Don.
You might remember Don as the guy who got drunk and mouthy and punched his girlfriend in front of me over Christmas break.
Well, Josh and Don had hung out a few days ago, and Josh wanted to tell me about it.
"Listen," he said. "Just listen to this story, okay? I think at the end of it you'll feel pretty good about it. You'll tell me it's okay."
"Okay," I said.
"Okay," he said. "So, at the end of the night I was really tired and I asked Don if I could just sleep in the bed with him because I didn't want to sleep on the floor. Don said no. No way. So, fine. The next thing I know, I'm waking up and hearing Don say, 'What the fuck are you doing?!'" Josh paused for dramatic effect. "I was pissing on him, Jess."
He started laughing, and I did, too.
"I was standing there and pissing on him. I've never peed my pants in my life, Jess, but there I was, deliberately peeing on him."
"Good!" I said. "He deserves it!"
"And I think it was for you!" he said. "I think deep down maybe I was doing it for you!"
Showing posts with label Bianca. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bianca. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Monday, June 23, 2008
This Is What My Life Would've Been Like If I Hadn't Gone to College
Yesterday morning I got up early and packed my car and drove to Buffalo a day earlier than I'd originally planned. I wanted to surprise the Boy From Work, who was working until nine o'clock. When I got into town, I drove up to the restaurant, circled the lot once, and sent him a message.
Would you do me a favor? the message said.
Usually the BFW is bored at work during his long Sunday shift--and the lot, which was mostly empty--seemed to support my idea that he'd be bored at that very moment and be able to text me back and say, What?
And then I was going to say, Come outside and give me a kiss.
So I waited and waited and waited, and the BFW did not respond. So I shut my car off, fixed my makeup, and went into the restaurant. The bar was empty, except for two snarly-looking guys who were drinking beer and trading stories about girls. I sat at the other end of the bar and waited for the bartender to come back from wherever she was. When she came in a few seconds later, she smiled, asked me what I wanted to drink, asked me how I was. Then, as she was pouring me a potent vodka-cran, she said, "Do you want me to get the BFW for you?"
"Sure," I said, "but this is a surprise. He doesn't know I drove in. I was supposed to come tomorrow."
"Oh," she said, raising her eyebrows, looking impressed. "Well, in that case, let me just go back there and tell him there's someone at the bar who really needs to talk to him."
"Sounds great," I said, and a few seconds later, a sweaty and shorn BFW--who just recently cut off all his hair--was standing in front of me, not looking all that surprised.
"I knew you were coming!" he said. "I just knew it!"
All I wanted to do was pet the boy's head. He looked so cute. And I would've rubbed his buzzed head all night if he let me, but he had to get back into the kitchen and get some things done before he was able to get out of there for the night, so he snuggled me close to his drenched, french-fry smelling body, introduced me to the two guys at the bar, and left me to my own devices.
So it was just me, the bartender, and the snarly guys. Before he'd left, the BFW had instructed me that if one of the guys gave me any trouble, all I needed to do was kick him in the balls.
Now one of them was slanting a smile my way. "I like to cause trouble," he informed me. "If you think you want to cause any trouble, you just come sit down here at this end with me."
"I'll consider it," I said. I drained my vodka-cran. Down at that end of the bar was my favorite thing in the world: the bar-top console that had Naked Lady Picture Find on it. "I do love the erotic photo hunt," I said.
"It's broken," the guy said. He gestured to the game, which was unplugged from the wall. "We don't know what's wrong with it."
"Sad," I said. "That's the one thing in the world that I'm good at."
And suddenly the guy lifted up from his seat and came down to my end, his beer caught between two fingers. "I think I'm going to sit down here and cause trouble with you," he said.
"Okay," I said.
For a while, we discussed women. We talked about how they're trouble, rotten, just plain no good. We talked about how sometimes they can redeem themselves--if they come home from the bar and do what they are asked and then, in the morning, disappear.
"I just had a girl," the guy told me, "who left a note that said she had a real good time, and that if I wanted to have more good sex with no strings attached, I should give her a call."
"Wow," I said. "Now there's a hell of a girl."
"Yeah," he said. "Now there's a hell of a girl."
This kind of talk required backup, so I called the only person I knew who would delight in sitting at the bar and listening to stories about the local skanks: I texted my favorite waitress--let's call her Bianca--and told her to get her ass down to the bar immediately.
Her message back said, Okay, but I'm broke.
I told her she and I could share a giant plate of loaded fries--which the BFW would dot with melted bleu cheese before bringing them out to us--and whatever else she wanted.
She was there in five minutes. Before she arrived, I'd informed my new friend that we were about to be joined by someone more uniquely suited for this kind of talk. "You'll like her," I said. "She's young and blond and dirty."
"She sounds like my type of girl," the guy said, and of course she was. When she sat on the stool next to me, it was suddenly a whirl of stories of the type that would delight any guy who enjoyed drunk girls--and this guy really, really, really enjoyed drunk girls.
"You know," Bianca said, "I got rocks in my underwear once. How about that?"
"How did you get rocks in your underwear?" he asked.
She'd gotten rocks in her underwear after a night of binge drinking in the town where I went to college. She'd let strange boys buy her shot after shot after shot and then she let her friends pile her back into a car. When they were on their way to somewhere else, Bianca realized she had to pee. Badly. And right that second. Her friends let her out of the car and she--instead of waiting until they got her to the bathroom--pulled down her pants, sat down on the road like it was a toilet seat, and went. The next morning she woke up with pebbles pressed into her butt, scattered in her panties.
"And there's this," she said, flipping open her phone and showing us a picture of her squatting over a sink. "My friend was on the toilet, and I couldn't wait anymore," she said.
The snarly guy loved her. If she hadn't been four years older than his oldest son, I'm sure he might've tried to take her back to his place. But before proclamations of love could be made, Bianca got a message from her best friend, who was at the town park--specifically the hockey rink--and Bianca's boyfriend, whom she'd been fighting with all day--was there, too. He was playing hockey. This was news to Bianca. Earlier that day, they'd gotten in a fight because she'd left her house without informing him of where she was going and what she was doing, so she found it interesting that now he was off doing something he hadn't informed her about.
"Oh, that's it," she said. "He's so fucking dead. I'm going to go down there and tell him he's so fucking dead." She looked at me. "Let's go. Want to ride with me?"
I did. After all, it sounded interesting. It sounded like an intriguing way to kill an hour while I waited for the BFW to get off of work. And so we said goodbye to the snarly guy and told the BFW we'd be right back, that we had to go take care of something, and we were off.
On the way there, Bianca rolled down the window and smoked a cigarette, frowning every time she put it to her mouth. It was a warm night, so people were roaming across the town. There were girls wearing too-short shorts, guys with long hair and goth clothes. Bianca knew them all. She told me who was whose boyfriend or girlfriend, who was a bitch or a slut or a fucking idiot. She told me which ones she was related to, which ones she used to date. When we passed a cop, she said, "Oh, that's the one who's friends with my ex. He likes to follow me around town and try to intimidate me." She flicked her cigarette. "He's pretty hot. I'd fuck him."
When we got to the park, there was a bunch of boys playing basketball on one of the courts. Bianca's cousin was among them. "Hey," she yelled. "Don't let the hood rats get in my car, okay?" Then she turned to me and lowered her voice. "See the one in the teal?"
"Yeah," I said. "He's cute."
"I used to date him," she said. "He's really bad in bed."
By then we were stalking toward the hockey rink. We could see her boyfriend, who was sprinting from one end to the other, yelling things like, Hey! Fuck! Hey! Hey! Hey! Over here! Come on! FUCK!
"Does he see me?" she asked. "Oh, he sees me. He totally sees me. He's dead. Look! He knows he's fucking dead!"
"What exactly are we going to do?" I asked. It seemed unlikely that he was going to pause the game so he could come over and work things out with Bianca.
"We're going to stare at him," she said. She crossed her arms and stared.
I stared, too. I tried to look tough. Pissed.
She flipped open her phone and typed. Don't think I'm here for you, she said. If he asked, she was going to tell him she was there to see her friends, who were over by the basketball court.
And then, right in the middle of the game, her boyfriend took his phone from his pocket, read it, and typed, Did I say you were? before running back down the rink and swatting at the puck.
"Well," I said. "Okay."
"He's so fucking dead!" she said. "Okay, we're done. Let's go. I'm not speaking to him ever again."
On our walk back to the car, she pushed her already-pouty lips out to an impressive frown. "How often do you do this?" I asked.
"What?"
"Fight like this," I said.
"Oh," she said, "every day."
And then she started telling me about the guys on the basketball court--which ones she liked, which ones she didn't, which ones had babies, which ones had been arrested, which ones had babies and had been arrested because they were selling drugs out of their apartment while the baby slept, which ones were retarded, which ones were fuckers.
"You know," I said, "you're all very incestuous, even if you did go to that big high school."
She turned and glared back at the hockey rink one more time.
"Okay," I said, tugging on her shirt. "Let's go. I want a hot fudge sundae. Let me buy you some ice cream."
Would you do me a favor? the message said.
Usually the BFW is bored at work during his long Sunday shift--and the lot, which was mostly empty--seemed to support my idea that he'd be bored at that very moment and be able to text me back and say, What?
And then I was going to say, Come outside and give me a kiss.
So I waited and waited and waited, and the BFW did not respond. So I shut my car off, fixed my makeup, and went into the restaurant. The bar was empty, except for two snarly-looking guys who were drinking beer and trading stories about girls. I sat at the other end of the bar and waited for the bartender to come back from wherever she was. When she came in a few seconds later, she smiled, asked me what I wanted to drink, asked me how I was. Then, as she was pouring me a potent vodka-cran, she said, "Do you want me to get the BFW for you?"
"Sure," I said, "but this is a surprise. He doesn't know I drove in. I was supposed to come tomorrow."
"Oh," she said, raising her eyebrows, looking impressed. "Well, in that case, let me just go back there and tell him there's someone at the bar who really needs to talk to him."
"Sounds great," I said, and a few seconds later, a sweaty and shorn BFW--who just recently cut off all his hair--was standing in front of me, not looking all that surprised.
"I knew you were coming!" he said. "I just knew it!"
All I wanted to do was pet the boy's head. He looked so cute. And I would've rubbed his buzzed head all night if he let me, but he had to get back into the kitchen and get some things done before he was able to get out of there for the night, so he snuggled me close to his drenched, french-fry smelling body, introduced me to the two guys at the bar, and left me to my own devices.
So it was just me, the bartender, and the snarly guys. Before he'd left, the BFW had instructed me that if one of the guys gave me any trouble, all I needed to do was kick him in the balls.
Now one of them was slanting a smile my way. "I like to cause trouble," he informed me. "If you think you want to cause any trouble, you just come sit down here at this end with me."
"I'll consider it," I said. I drained my vodka-cran. Down at that end of the bar was my favorite thing in the world: the bar-top console that had Naked Lady Picture Find on it. "I do love the erotic photo hunt," I said.
"It's broken," the guy said. He gestured to the game, which was unplugged from the wall. "We don't know what's wrong with it."
"Sad," I said. "That's the one thing in the world that I'm good at."
And suddenly the guy lifted up from his seat and came down to my end, his beer caught between two fingers. "I think I'm going to sit down here and cause trouble with you," he said.
"Okay," I said.
For a while, we discussed women. We talked about how they're trouble, rotten, just plain no good. We talked about how sometimes they can redeem themselves--if they come home from the bar and do what they are asked and then, in the morning, disappear.
"I just had a girl," the guy told me, "who left a note that said she had a real good time, and that if I wanted to have more good sex with no strings attached, I should give her a call."
"Wow," I said. "Now there's a hell of a girl."
"Yeah," he said. "Now there's a hell of a girl."
This kind of talk required backup, so I called the only person I knew who would delight in sitting at the bar and listening to stories about the local skanks: I texted my favorite waitress--let's call her Bianca--and told her to get her ass down to the bar immediately.
Her message back said, Okay, but I'm broke.
I told her she and I could share a giant plate of loaded fries--which the BFW would dot with melted bleu cheese before bringing them out to us--and whatever else she wanted.
She was there in five minutes. Before she arrived, I'd informed my new friend that we were about to be joined by someone more uniquely suited for this kind of talk. "You'll like her," I said. "She's young and blond and dirty."
"She sounds like my type of girl," the guy said, and of course she was. When she sat on the stool next to me, it was suddenly a whirl of stories of the type that would delight any guy who enjoyed drunk girls--and this guy really, really, really enjoyed drunk girls.
"You know," Bianca said, "I got rocks in my underwear once. How about that?"
"How did you get rocks in your underwear?" he asked.
She'd gotten rocks in her underwear after a night of binge drinking in the town where I went to college. She'd let strange boys buy her shot after shot after shot and then she let her friends pile her back into a car. When they were on their way to somewhere else, Bianca realized she had to pee. Badly. And right that second. Her friends let her out of the car and she--instead of waiting until they got her to the bathroom--pulled down her pants, sat down on the road like it was a toilet seat, and went. The next morning she woke up with pebbles pressed into her butt, scattered in her panties.
"And there's this," she said, flipping open her phone and showing us a picture of her squatting over a sink. "My friend was on the toilet, and I couldn't wait anymore," she said.
The snarly guy loved her. If she hadn't been four years older than his oldest son, I'm sure he might've tried to take her back to his place. But before proclamations of love could be made, Bianca got a message from her best friend, who was at the town park--specifically the hockey rink--and Bianca's boyfriend, whom she'd been fighting with all day--was there, too. He was playing hockey. This was news to Bianca. Earlier that day, they'd gotten in a fight because she'd left her house without informing him of where she was going and what she was doing, so she found it interesting that now he was off doing something he hadn't informed her about.
"Oh, that's it," she said. "He's so fucking dead. I'm going to go down there and tell him he's so fucking dead." She looked at me. "Let's go. Want to ride with me?"
I did. After all, it sounded interesting. It sounded like an intriguing way to kill an hour while I waited for the BFW to get off of work. And so we said goodbye to the snarly guy and told the BFW we'd be right back, that we had to go take care of something, and we were off.
On the way there, Bianca rolled down the window and smoked a cigarette, frowning every time she put it to her mouth. It was a warm night, so people were roaming across the town. There were girls wearing too-short shorts, guys with long hair and goth clothes. Bianca knew them all. She told me who was whose boyfriend or girlfriend, who was a bitch or a slut or a fucking idiot. She told me which ones she was related to, which ones she used to date. When we passed a cop, she said, "Oh, that's the one who's friends with my ex. He likes to follow me around town and try to intimidate me." She flicked her cigarette. "He's pretty hot. I'd fuck him."
When we got to the park, there was a bunch of boys playing basketball on one of the courts. Bianca's cousin was among them. "Hey," she yelled. "Don't let the hood rats get in my car, okay?" Then she turned to me and lowered her voice. "See the one in the teal?"
"Yeah," I said. "He's cute."
"I used to date him," she said. "He's really bad in bed."
By then we were stalking toward the hockey rink. We could see her boyfriend, who was sprinting from one end to the other, yelling things like, Hey! Fuck! Hey! Hey! Hey! Over here! Come on! FUCK!
"Does he see me?" she asked. "Oh, he sees me. He totally sees me. He's dead. Look! He knows he's fucking dead!"
"What exactly are we going to do?" I asked. It seemed unlikely that he was going to pause the game so he could come over and work things out with Bianca.
"We're going to stare at him," she said. She crossed her arms and stared.
I stared, too. I tried to look tough. Pissed.
She flipped open her phone and typed. Don't think I'm here for you, she said. If he asked, she was going to tell him she was there to see her friends, who were over by the basketball court.
And then, right in the middle of the game, her boyfriend took his phone from his pocket, read it, and typed, Did I say you were? before running back down the rink and swatting at the puck.
"Well," I said. "Okay."
"He's so fucking dead!" she said. "Okay, we're done. Let's go. I'm not speaking to him ever again."
On our walk back to the car, she pushed her already-pouty lips out to an impressive frown. "How often do you do this?" I asked.
"What?"
"Fight like this," I said.
"Oh," she said, "every day."
And then she started telling me about the guys on the basketball court--which ones she liked, which ones she didn't, which ones had babies, which ones had been arrested, which ones had babies and had been arrested because they were selling drugs out of their apartment while the baby slept, which ones were retarded, which ones were fuckers.
"You know," I said, "you're all very incestuous, even if you did go to that big high school."
She turned and glared back at the hockey rink one more time.
"Okay," I said, tugging on her shirt. "Let's go. I want a hot fudge sundae. Let me buy you some ice cream."
Saturday, June 21, 2008
If She Knew I Was Writing About Her, She Might Say, "Why the Hell Would You Do A Stupid Thing Like That?"
Since I came back from Buffalo at the beginning of June, I have been doing a whole lot of nothing. This summers-off thing is pretty great, and I've been using my new free time to catch up on a lot of things: cleaning, recipe-testing, and reading. I've been going on long walks. I've been collecting seashells. I've been lying on the beach. I've been honing my freckles.
I've also started a new writing project. It started out as a single story, but then I realized what I was really gearing up to write was a long, long, long love letter to all the people I worked with last summer. It was especially a love letter to my favorite waitress at the diner, a girl whose boobs I have seen on numerous occasions after she has called my name so sweetly, only to get me to turn around and see her standing by the grill (or the back booth or the jukebox or the pie case), half nude.
When I started writing, I wanted to pay some sort of homage to her. It's not just that she's weird, crazy, and a little wild; it's that she's got a life that you would not believe. If, over the course of last summer, I had kept a diary of everything that happened to her in a month's time, people would have read it and said, "This can't be true. You made it all up."
But I swear on everything holy, I would've made none of it up. None of it. Here is a list of some of the things that make her more interesting than anyone else I've ever waitressed with:
I've also started a new writing project. It started out as a single story, but then I realized what I was really gearing up to write was a long, long, long love letter to all the people I worked with last summer. It was especially a love letter to my favorite waitress at the diner, a girl whose boobs I have seen on numerous occasions after she has called my name so sweetly, only to get me to turn around and see her standing by the grill (or the back booth or the jukebox or the pie case), half nude.
When I started writing, I wanted to pay some sort of homage to her. It's not just that she's weird, crazy, and a little wild; it's that she's got a life that you would not believe. If, over the course of last summer, I had kept a diary of everything that happened to her in a month's time, people would have read it and said, "This can't be true. You made it all up."
But I swear on everything holy, I would've made none of it up. None of it. Here is a list of some of the things that make her more interesting than anyone else I've ever waitressed with:
- Whenever her very sexually active fifteen year-old brother sleeps with someone new, he makes that girl leave behind the pair of panties she was wearing, and he tacks them up to his wall.
- When she was pulled over for speeding, she got out of it because she had a box in the back of her car--a box the cop found suspicious and asked her to open--and that box was full of her collection of sex toys. The cop, flustered, sent her on her way.
- Her mother washes her own vibrators in the dishwasher.
- At all times, her mother has a trunk stocked with the following things: Avon merchandise and bizarre pornos: clown porn, midget porn, I-swear-I'm-eighteen porn.
- Her brother has punched her.
- Her brother has been arrested, suspended, and sent away to a special school for angry boys.
- She has very seriously thought about driving over to the house of a waitress she hates just to shit on the hood of her car.
On their own, those things are just amusing anecdotes. You can't build a story based on amusing anecdotes (although I certainly tried that a whole bunch in grad school), but, luckily, this girl is made of more than just amusing anecdotes. There is something so sad, so pretty, so delicate about her, and it just begs to be written. I've seen her sitting on her couch and crying because she's so sore from having a layer of her skin stripped off because it's cancer again. I've seen her nervous about people seeing her new scars. I've seen her angry and heartbroken and glaring across the table at a boy who has, with a few clipped words, broken her heart for the fifth time that day--a cycle that will repeat for months and months and months and months.
And so I tried to write about her. I tried to do her justice. But as I started, I realized I couldn't do her justice without doing justice to everyone else who worked with me. There were five or six people at the diner who shocked me on a regular basis last summer, and they filled me with so much material that I'm just looking for the right place to put it. And I think I might have found it now. I think maybe what I'm doing is writing a collection of connected stories, although right now it feels more like a novel where each character gets a turn at narration. So even if I'm not exactly sure how it's being pieced together, the first part is done, and I'm moving on to the next narrator.
And I'd like to tell my favorite waitress just how fond I am of some of the things the character who resembles her says and does and thinks, but I know if I explain what I am doing and what I am writing, she will just scrunch up her face and say, "Why would anyone want to write about me?"
And I would tell her I've never before been asked a question with such an obvious answer.
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