Adventures In Dating V: The State School Slam-Pig

I don’t know from “fotolia,” but my guess is they’ve copyrighted this image.

Just so I can get this out of the way, that’s a roman numeral in the title of this post, “V” is not the name of any girl I’ve ever dated. Come to think of it, I can’t even recall a time when I so much as listlessly played with myself while imagining a girl whose name started with the letter. It’s probably for the best, when I think of names like Victoria, or Vanessa, or Veronica, unpleasant thoughts come to mine. There’s no middle ground with “V”s, they’re either upper-class cunts or low-class sluts. I’m probably better off not knowing any “V”s. This story details the torrid month-and-a-half I spent trying to sleep with a girl I met at a mall when I was frequenting a Wegmans in New Jersey. For anonymity’s sake we’ll call her “Reagan.”

I was a junior in college. Summer vacation had just started. I was looking fit and trim after a year of not eating, and not living on opposite ends of the same college campus from my ex-girlfriend opened up an entirely new world of women for me to pursue. The dating pool had increased from 1,000 girls (maybe a quarter of which knew about my failed relationship, thus tainting me for the remainder of my college years) to…all of them, I guess. The world was my oyster, and I intended to shuck that thing and tongue the shit out of it. See what I did there? I made a thinly veiled cunnilingus joke.

Every week or two during my summer break I would drive to Wegmans for lunch. Later, I would troll around Route 1 and hit up places like Vintage Vinyl, Princeton Record Exchange, or see friends in the Rutgers area. One day after lunch I decided to take a stroll through the mall nearby. I remember it was one of those disgusting mid-summer days and I really didn’t want to just get back in my car and drive home after my seven-inch chicken finger sub meal. I’d already worn out my welcome with all the disgustingly-attractive, barely-legal lifeguards working the pool in my mother’s development. I don’t know, maybe I was subconsciously looking for a new video game to play at 4am when I was stoned and unable to sleep.

I must have taken three laps around the mall before I finally stopped in to say “Hi” to her. She was working at the kind of store a dork like myself would frequent. I’m not going to say, because who-the-fuck knows if she still keeps tabs on me. Anyway, imagine a store in a mall that isn’t clothing-related or appliance related. Now imagine me walking into it. She was behind the counter wearing a turquoise short-sleeved shirt and jeans. Her shoulder length hair was pulled back in a cute little pony tail, I couldn’t tell you what color her eyes were, and none of that mattered because Jesus Christ did she have an amazing rack. There, I said it. I walked around the exterior of the mall three times so that I could stare at this girl’s tits three times, and then I decided to walk into the store because, well, the view was better.

Those of you who know me will never believe me when I say this, but I just started talking to her. The store was empty, I was one confused look from shitting my pants, but I found the courage to say hi and initiate a conversation. And after five or ten minutes of talking about I don’t remember what, she said she needed to take her lunch break. I asked if I could join her.

What the fuck!? That statement carries with it two entirely unbelievable facts. Number one is, I’m not the type of person who is confident enough to ask out someone I’ve just met. I never have been, I never will be, and…I still don’t remember the precise wording or tone of voice or anything about it. For those five seconds between my “Hey, want some company!?” or whatever creepy thing I said and her saying, “Sure!” I existed in some alternate dimension where space and time were completely foreign to me. I was on autopilot. It’s like I blacked out for what could have inevitably turned out to be the most important fifteen seconds of my life (spoiler alert: it didn’t!). The second unbelievable fact is that I would want to go to lunch with a girl after I’d just eaten. I was 21 years old at the time and pretty much anorexic. You know she had to be hot in order to get me to agree to eating two meals within an hour of each other. We exchanged names, she ran to the back room to tell her boss she was going on break, and we walked together to fucking Burger King on the bottom floor of the mall.

I learned a lot about Reagan during our 30-minute lunch. She went to Rutgers. She didn’t know anybody that I know (I breathed a sigh of relief). Her parents were divorced. My parents were divorced! Well, her parents weren’t exactly divorced, her mom was dead, but at least neither of us had a family in the literal sense. I liked that. Ugh…that’s pretty dark, right? Before you even ask, the answer is yes: I found out her mother died by making some (in-hindsight) off-color remark that resulted in her basically saying, “My mom is dead.” Whoops.

She admitted that she was turning 21 in a few months. We liked the some movies, some of the same music, all that gay shit people talk about during a Burger King first date. She ate a fucking double cheeseburger. I was so aroused my dick nearly broke through the table. I ate an order of large fries. I must have looked like the biggest queer to ever walk the planet. I don’t know, maybe that’s why she wasn’t threatened by me. I also made sure not to stare at her body the entire time we were seated together. I even took a minute to notice she had brown eyes. She had a pretty smile. I asked if she was seeing anybody and she made some vague reference to a guy she was on-again-off-again with, but after a few seconds of scuttling around searching for an answer she said “No.” I asked if she waxed her asshole. No I didn’t. Our thirty minutes in paradise came to an end really quickly. I tried to be a gentleman and I cleared the table before walking her back to the store. We exchanged phone numbers and (cringe) said we’d find one another on MySpace. Then I left the mall. I don’t remember if I began to beat my dick i the car on the Garden State Parkway or once I returned home.

For two or three weeks we chatted through MySpace, on AIM, and sent sporadic text messages. They were never exactly hot-and-heavy, but we talked about pretty much everything and the topic of sex was raised a few times. I took this as a hint maybe Reagan was interested in me, but I couldn’t act on it. Having come back down to Earth after my unexpected, uncharacteristic ballsy display at the mall, I refused to ask her out. The self-consciousness I’d briefly shed had returned. The closest I got was sending a text message inquiring about weekend plans, but I never followed up with an invitation to hang out. Perhaps sensing my inability to function like a normal guy trying to sleep with a girl, Reagan asked if I wanted to come down to New Brunswick and hang out with her an a random weeknight. Rapid-fire mental images of dropping loads on her chest nearly distracted me from responding. I played it cool, waited an hour or two before responding, and then wrote, “Yeah, whatever. When’s good for you?”

I was so busy playing cool I didn’t even notice she’d already sent a text including a day and a place.

I had a couple days to prepare. I hadn’t gotten laid in almost six months. Maybe longer. It’s hard for me to remember all these years later when the last time I used my ex for sex was before she became hip to my I-can-get-laid-without-having-to-deal-with-any-of-the-bullshit scheme and finally put an end to it. The point is, there was a lot I needed to do before this date if I was to ensure consensual penis-in-vagina. Most of it involved grooming myself, but some if it involved researching tips on how to make her want to jump me before we even got back to her place.

I’ve glossed over some of the more nuanced details of the weeks in between our meeting and our first big date, but that’s because in the grand story they are quite inconsequential. It was pretty evident that we had a lot in common and that we seemed to like each other, but I’m not going to bore you with the minutiae. Instead I’ll just say that we spent a lot of time talking and typing to one another before our plans were made.

Little did I know the night of my big date with Reagan would be remembered as a) one of the hardest-partying nights of my life, b) a study in really weird sociological behaviors and c) the last time I would ever see Reagan.

Leo Kottke – Monkey Lust – (Buy from Amazon.com)
Free – All Right Now – (Buy from Amazon.com)
Furry Lewis – Kassie Jones – (Buy from Amazon.com)